Maintenance Scheduling

How to save time and money in your practice.

Here is a brief outline of how to develop and prepare an effective maintenance schedule for your surgery.

The aim is to identify the key equipment components in your surgery and working through some general principals in developing your maintenance schedule.
  
Because every surgery is unique, you will need to work through some basic steps to help you devise an effective maintenance plan for you circumstances.

1. Identify all the key components

2. Produce a surgery equipment plan

3. Produce an inventory - List all of your equipment (make, model & serial number)

4. Categorise your equipment - work through the list.

5. Identify what maintenance is required for each piece of equipment

6. Produce a Standard Operating Procedure (S.O.P.)  for every item

7. Implement a detailed maintenance schedule

• Identify all your equipment
  
  Step1, locate it, identify it, so you can maintain it.
• Practice Equipment Plan
  
  Step2, record where it is so everyone can locate it.
• Equipment Inventory
  
  Step3, List all of your equipment and details

This should not be too daunting a task. Each piece of equipment you have in your surgery will have come with the manufactures instruction book. In almost every case they will have detailed recommendations on how to use and maintain their equipment correctly. It will most like also include recommendations at to the actual maintenance periods as well ie.- how often and what exactly should be done to keep the equipment in a serviceable condition. This will include what should be done as part of normal surgery care, and what should be done by your technicians and how often. Most major equipment requires an annual service to keep it in good repair. 

This means that most of the hard work is already done for you. By referencing these manuals in the 1st instance and applying some other considerations to them, you already have all the information you need to produce a SOP. What other considerations you might ask, there could be several, such as ADA recommendations, relevant Australian Standards and  local government bylaws to keep in mind, just to mention a few.

Having this information together and accessible, as a set of S.O.P.’s will make your much life easier.

So how will S.O.P.’s help save time and money?

Carrying out appropriate & recommended maintenance and services  means your equipment should have fewer break-downs.

This means your equipment should work correctly for you every time you have to use it. ( in engineering parlance, you will achieve  “much higher equipment availability”)

As a consequence, you will have  much less  lost time having to reschedule patients because of break-downs.

Training staff, especially new staff should be considerably easier as the information is easily accessible in the form of a S.O.P.

An other of the big benefits of having S.O.P.’s is that they also help to minimize incorrect maintenance procedures and practices which can be causing serious detriment to the very same equipment that is trying to maintained. A very high proportion of break down calls out we attend is because of this exact phenomena.

Developing a formalised equipment maintenance schedule will help make the care and repair of your equipment less of a chore. It should also significantly extend the serviceable life of your equipment in the process.

So in brief, fewer breakdowns, less staff stress, improved staff training, more productivity and longer equipment life. The savings in time and money are obvious and that easy to achive.

We offer maintenance planning  as one of our services, so if you need help, we will be only to pleased to assist you in developing a professional maintenance schedule for your surgery