Proposed research methodology for establishing the critical success factors for maintenance management of hospital buildings

Abstract

There is an increasing recognition amongst healthcare organisations on the need to improve building performance in order to increase healthcare delivery, profits, and patients’ recovery and to reduce penalties. While, maintenance costs of hospital buildings have increased significantly, fire outbreaks, equipment breakdowns, and decay of a building’s components, structure and fabric suggest a need to conduct empirical research to investigate the maintenance management practices of the hospital buildings. There are some pieces of evidence which indicate that the current approaches to the maintenance of the hospital buildings have been corrective, fragmented, cost-driven, and expensive. The literature on the maintenance practices of hospital buildings contains proposals and some descriptions of the current approaches. However, the research efforts are scanty and lack substantial theoretical and empirical justifications. Therefore, the main research, of which this article forms part, aims to develop a model for the maintenance management of hospital buildings. However, the main purpose of this current article is to present the framework for the research methodology for the main research. The lack of clear research philosophy on the hospital building maintenance is leading to poor research findings and recommendations and thereby contributing to the increase in maintenance costs, shorter maintenance-span, loss of profits and higher complaints. It is found that positivism ontology and objectivism epistemology is the appropriate metaphysical orientations of the main research. The main research involves qualitative and quantitative data. The findings suggest that performance surveys, interviews, experiments, case studies, and survey questionnaires are appropriate for the main research.