Preventive maintenance in medical facilities: a guide
Preventive maintenance is pivotal in maintaining infrastructure and equipment uptime in healthcare and medical facilities.
The stakes couldn’t be higher, as equipment and infrastructure failure and downtime have been shown to negatively impact clinical outcomes and staff safety.
Preventive maintenance is a surefire strategy for improving the performance of medical facilities while delivering on compliance responsibilities.
In this guide, we’ll provide a step-by-step guide to creating a preventive maintenance plan, scheduling, automating work orders, and evaluating the plan’s effectiveness.
What is preventive maintenance?
Preventive maintenance is a proactive approach to maintaining equipment and infrastructure.
It involves performing regular inspections, cleaning, servicing, and repairs to prevent potential failures or breakdowns.
Crucially, preventive maintenance differs from reactive maintenance, which addresses issues only after they have occurred.
Preventive maintenance typically involves time-based or usage-based schedules and aims to address minor faults before they bloom into catastrophic failure.
This produces favourable outcomes. For example, in industrial maintenance, approximately 60% of companies associate preventive maintenance with enhanced productivity. Around 60% state that preventive maintenance decreases downtime and improves safety.
Similar statistics are observed in the healthcare and medical industry, which has led organisations such as the NHS, regulators such as the FDA, and international organisations such as the Joint Commission to encourage healthcare operators to invest in preventive maintenance strategies.
Applications of preventive maintenance in Healthcare & Medical Facilities
H&M facilities in the UK are regulated by many laws that govern their operation, maintenance and management of the building itself, and upkeep of medical devices, etc.
Here are some examples:
Medical equipment such as MRI machines, CT scanners, X-ray machines, ventilators, and infusion pumps require regular maintenance to ensure they function correctly. This is imperative to maintaining patient care and clinical outcomes.
Preventive maintenance involves inspections, calibration, cleaning, repair and replacement of components, ensuring medical devices operate at peak performance and reducing the risk of equipment failure.
Healthcare facilities like hospitals and clinics rely on well-maintained infrastructure for smooth operation.
Preventive maintenance doesn’t just cover medical devices – it also includes inspecting and maintaining HVAC, electrical, plumbing, and building structures. Regular maintenance ensures these systems function efficiently and reduces the likelihood of unexpected downtime.
Healthcare organisations must adhere to strict safety standards and regulatory requirements.
Preventive maintenance ensures that medical devices, equipment, facilities, and infrastructure meet these standards.
Regular inspections, tests, and maintenance tasks help organisations maintain compliance with regulations, avoid fines, and enhance patient safety.
Healthcare facilities rely on IT systems for managing patient records, lab results, medical imaging, and other essential functions.
Preventive maintenance of these systems involves regular software updates, data backups, and security measures to protect sensitive information and ensure uninterrupted access to critical systems.
Infection control is a top priority in healthcare settings.
Preventive maintenance includes the regular maintenance and validation of sterilisation equipment and strict cleaning protocols for patient rooms, operating theatres, etc.
As we can see, preventive maintenance enables organisations to maintain the reliability and performance of their equipment, facilities, and systems. This leads to improved patient care, enhanced safety, and cost savings.
Why is preventive maintenance so important in healthcare?
Preventive maintenance is essential in healthcare settings as both staff and patients depend on the function of the physical environment. This includes both medical devices and infrastructural components such as lighting and HVACs.
Here’s why preventive maintenance is critical in healthcare settings:
Patient safety
The primary concern in healthcare is patient safety. Properly maintained medical equipment and facilities reduce the risk of accidents and errors, ensuring that patients receive accurate diagnoses and effective treatments. A 2022 study published in the National Library of Medicine highlights equipment failure from poor maintenance as a significant cause of patient injuries and adverse events.
Regulatory compliance
Healthcare facilities must comply with strict equipment and facility maintenance regulations. Preventive maintenance helps organisations maintain accurate records and adhere to these requirements, avoiding penalties and ensuring patient safety.
Cost savings
Preventive maintenance can help organisations avoid costly repairs or replacements by identifying potential issues early. Regular maintenance can also extend the life of equipment, resulting in cost savings over time.The NHS encourages managers to engage in preventive maintenance to reduce maintenance backlogs and improve clinical outcomes.
Creating a preventive maintenance plan: step-by-step
Setting goals
First, begin by establishing goals for the preventive maintenance plan. Are you aiming to reduce downtime, increase asset reliability, cut costs, or boost maintenance rates? Assess your current maintenance strategies and identify any shortcomings or failures. This initial evaluation will serve as your starting point and is encouraged by the NHS and Joint Committee.
Conduct an asset inventory
Catalogue all assets by organising them into equipment groups and locations. Each asset should be associated with the manufacturer's recommendations, warranties, and relevant quality benchmarks. Since medical devices are so diverse, there may be a few groups, ranging from ventilators to emergency medicine devices and manual equipment like trolleys and beds.
Prioritise assets
Prioritise critical assets which the facility depends on. To determine priorities, conduct a risk assessment to rank the priority level of each asset. For example, inspecting emergency medical devices may be a priority as they’re used in health-critical situations. Likewise, from an infrastructural perspective, gas or plumbing issues should be prioritised to prevent health and safety risks.
Review and improve the plan
Depending on the results obtained (measured using the defined KPIs), make gradual improvements to the plan. We’ve provided some evaluation and review metrics below.
Draw up a preventive maintenance schedule
After crafting the plan and compiling assets, define schedule dates, times, teams and tasks.
This process can be divided into five steps:
- Assess labour productivity: Determine how many hours maintenance technicians spend on actual work orders (excluding time spent searching for tools, travelling, or reviewing requests). With proper planning, productivity can reach up to 50% of total hours, though the average is 25 to 35%.
- Analyse the maintenance backlog: Evaluate overdue work orders and complete pending tasks before moving on to new ones.
- Adjust the schedule based on the maintenance plan: Determine the required personnel, hours, materials, and tools for each task in the maintenance plan. Also, decide on the best days and times for scheduled maintenance, which may require temporarily disabling assets.
- Prepare for unexpected events: Unanticipated failures can occur, so schedules must be flexible and establish response times for reactive maintenance.
- Schedule work orders: Lastly, schedule work orders by day and time. Provide all necessary information for maintenance staff to perform maintenance efficiently.
Automating preventive maintenance work orders
Organising a maintenance plan for large facilities with numerous assets can be challenging.
Fortunately, an Intelligent Maintenance Management Platform (IMMP) can automate most preventive maintenance work orders and allows you to catalogue assets and associate them with key information.
This might include category, brand and model, serial numbers, location, technician, user manuals, and dates of previous maintenance.
- Schedule preventive maintenance tasks with an IMMP: Using maintenance management platforms simplifies the creation of preventive maintenance plans for different equipment. In addition, the software can automatically schedule work orders based on time and usage.
- Track the plan in real-time: Real-time monitoring is another advantage of using an IMMP for managing work orders. The software automatically analyses the data, calculates the main KPIs, and allows you to review and adjust the plans at any time.
Evaluation and review of preventive maintenance plan
Regardless of the specific assets you are managing and the unique KPIs you have defined for your healthcare facility, certain metrics and targets are always helpful to monitor.
- Preventive maintenance compliance rate: This is the preventive maintenance rate across an established time frame. Ideally, this should be at least 90%.
- 80/20 ratio for scheduled and non-scheduled maintenance: At least 80% of the hours spent on maintenance should be allocated to preventive work orders. A maximum of 20% of the time should be spent on reactive maintenance work orders, with an ideal goal of 85% scheduled maintenance.
- The 10% margin rule: Try to complete all work orders ahead of schedule with a 10% margin. For example, if you have a task to complete in 100 days, aim to finish it in 90 (10 days ahead of schedule).
By following these guidelines, you can develop and implement a comprehensive preventive maintenance plan tailored to your needs, and the needs of your facility.
Intelligent Maintenance Management Platforms (IMMPs): the way forward
Intelligent Maintenance Management Platforms (IMMPs) are advanced software solutions designed to streamline and optimise maintenance processes across various industries, including healthcare and medical facilities.
IMMPs bring together asset management, work order management, predictive maintenance scheduling and reporting and analytics.
By using IMMPs, organisations can improve equipment reliability, reduce unplanned downtime, enhance operational efficiency, and make data-driven decisions to optimise maintenance strategies.
Infraspeak’s IMMP supports cutting-edge preventive maintenance in dynamic healthcare and medical facilities. Contact us to learn more about it or to schedule a demo.
