Abstract:
The availability of specialized medical equipment
plays a critical role in the delivery of healthcare
services. This becomes even more critical in developing
countries where few medical devices are available in public
hospitals, hence do not commensurate with demand, which
leads to their overutilization. This often results in frequent
failure of the medical devices and as a result, low availability.
In turn, this leads to delayed treatment and consequently,
access to affordable and quality healthcare by the
disadvantaged in the society. This rather high unavailability
of critical medical equipment in public hospitals in
developing countries motivates this study, hence the
necessitating the need to implement optimal maintenance
strategies and operational protocols for maximizing
equipment availability. However, selecting such optimal
maintenance and operation strategies is not straightforward,
and for this reason, a risk-based maintenance
approach is proposed. The proposed approach addresses
the aforementioned challenge through structured steps through which maintenance practitioners identify and prioritize
prevalent failure modes. Based on the prioritized
failure modes, operation and maintenance protocols may be
derived. Moreover, the risk-based maintenance approach is
useful for among other decisions, root cause analysis. The
proposed risk-based maintenance approach consists of four
steps; (1) data collection and standardization process, (2)
modified failure mode and effect analysis step for prioritizing
critical failure modes, (3) a root cause analysis step
for analyzing the causes of recurrent failure modes, and (4)
formulation of operation and maintenance strategies for
mitigating equipment failure risks. The proposed approach
is demonstrated in application in a case of large teaching
and referral hospital in Kenya.
