Servicing of Medical Gas Plant Could Be a Casualty of the Recent Government Cuts!

        

  Has the squeeze on budget for healthcare estates meant that servicing of vital medical gas plant is being ignored?

Medical Air and Medical Vacuum plant are critical items of equipment in any hospital, as they provide vital medicinal gas to hospital patients. These gases are the responsibility of the chief pharmacist, but are looked after by the estates and facilities departments in most acute hospitals. The medical gas "bible" - HTM 02-01 leaves the servicing of this plant to be dealt with "under the manufacturers' recommendations." This effectively means that plant doesn't get serviced when it should. Other recommendations within the HTM 02-01 are being adhered to by most if not all healthcare estates, not just in this country but in many other countries throughout the world.

So why is it, that Medical Plant Servicing has become the poor relation when it comes to maintaining standards? 

When a quarterly Planned Preventative Maintenance report is presented to the Estates Manager or Medical Gas AP, it is very easy for the AP to request a quotation for the servicing and then ignore the quote. If a PPM engineer reports that plant requires a service, then it should be incumbent upon the Manager to act on the report, rather than let the servicing slide. Some plant in acute hospitals hasn't been serviced since it was installed. Some Estates Managers just leave the plant until it breaks down. The attitude being that they have an on-call servicing company, contracted to them for 24/7 call-outs, so they don't need to budget for servicing - just pay for expensive call-outs. If these managers had allocated budget for each piece of medical gas plant, they would not need to pay for so many expensive call-outs.

Keeping costs down in looking after medical gases is of course a priority for acute hospital estates departments; but their blinkered thinking has been caused by financial constraints put on them by financial managers, who do not understand the cost of not forward planning on a practical level for medical plant servicing.

It has been noted that some medical gas APs have no cap on their emergency call-out spend - presumably because of its unpredictable nature, yet have a cap on maintaining expensive and life-preserving equipment, whose budget falls in a different box.

When was the last time financial managers visited a plant room in their hospital?