An Assessment of the Effectiveness of Equipment Maintenance Practices in Public Hospitals

In the move towards world-class service delivery, many institutions are realizing a need for the use of proper maintenance of operation facilities and equipment. Health-care institutions, machines and equipment are becoming technologically more advanced and at the same time more complex and difficult to control. The purpose of the paper was to assess the effectiveness of the maintenance practices used in the maintenance of equipment at three public hospitals. The researchers set objectives which were to determine the different maintenance practices used to maintain the hospitals equipment, challenges of these maintenance practices and the effect of maintenance practices on health-care service delivery. Purposive sampling was used in the distribution of 55 questionnaires among the operators and the workers. The results reviewed a high rate of equipment unavailability attributed by high failure rates due to unreliable schedule systems for equipment, high equipment breakdowns and shortage of manpower. As a result of these challenges, only 24% of the respondents agreed the health service delivery was good, while 76% agreed it was not good. 84% of the respondents in the maintenance department agreed the maintenance practices used in the maintenance of the equipment were giving a lot of challenges while 16% were not sure. As a result of these findings, the researchers grouped the different hospital equipment into different categories based on the level of criticality and designed an effective maintenance model based on reliability centered maintenance (RCM) for the purpose of improving the availability and reliability of the hospital equipment in order to add value to the health-care service.