Abstract
Medical equipment needs to be managed effectively and carefully from the first step of buying the equipment till being scraped. This includes purchasing procedure, operational procedures and he maintenance policies used in this regards. Managing the maintenance of medical equipment is vital for the patient and for the hospital itself. One of the main problems in healthcare sector today is the availability of medical equipment, which is largely affected by downtime variation needed to repair the medical equipment. This study presents a process improvement study applied on the Downtime of the medical equipments during the maintenance work in the Jordanian of Health Hospitals, based on customized Six Sigma methodology- DMAIC- (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control). Data was collected from different locations and different equipments to study the problem and make the necessary actions to resolve or reduce downtime. Obtained results indicate that the downtime reduced by 35% by introducing a new procedure to the clinical engineer to used when dealing with any medical equipment for maintenance work.
Highlights
This paper discusses and investigates the application of Six Sigma (SS) concepts and tools in planning and execution of corrective maintenance activities and procedures used for maintaining and repair of medical equipment across the Jordanian Public Health Sector (JPHS).Even though the notion of predominantly-corrective-maintenance (CM) practice is considered to be an indication of poor maintenance strategy according to universal maintenance practice standards (Alsyouf, I. 2007), this mode of practice remains the prevailing realm of maintenance activities in the medical sector (Gill Ginsburg, (2004) and would be extremely difficult to shift towards maintenance practice patterns employed in traditional production and manufacturing environments where considerable portions of these activities are executed through preventive (PM) and/or predictive maintenance (PDM) procedures
The main problem to be tackled through this study is the lack of reasonable availability levels reported for medical devices caused by significant equipment-downtimes, which in turn are the result of lengthy maintenance procedures practiced throughout JPHS
A multiple regression model of the downtime was developed. This model could be used to show the decision maker which variables are mostly affecting the downtime, and what decisions should be made regarding such variables to reduce their effects on the downtime
Summary
Abstract—Medical tools needs to be managed efficiently and sensibly from the initial step of procurement till being damaged. This includes acquiring procedure, operative procedures and the maintenance policies used in this regards. Managing the maintenance of medical tools is vigorous for the patient, medical doctors and for the hospital itself. This research presents a process enhancement applied on the Downtime of the medical tools during the maintenance work in the Jordanian of Health Hospitals, based on adapted Six Sigma methodology- DMAIC- (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control). Data was collected from different locations for different tools to study and analyze the downtime problem and make the necessary actions to reduce it
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