MAINTENANCE OF BIOMEDICAL EQUIPMENT

It’s a sad reality in government offices that vehicles, machineries and equipment are condemned by declaring these as “unserviceable”, even if in reality, these are still repairable. There is a rule in government that it is acceptable to repair defective items for as long as the cost of the repair will not exceed half of the acquisition cost. More often than not however, some government find it “easier” to buy new items rather than have these repaired. When the computer technologies shifted from Local Area Networks (LANs) to the cloud, the burden of repairs lessened, as the workload shifted from onsite to online. That is the case of office computing, but that is not going to be the case when it comes to hospital automation. In the case of the latter, most of the equipment would still be onsite. Although biomedical equipment are technically just computer equipment also, the latter are more difficult to maintain and repair, aside from the fact that these are mostly mission critical and would usually be used in life and death situations. That is the reason why biomedical repair and maintenance would require higher sets of skills. Dr. Luis Ramon Rodriguez, President of Philippine Medical Depot (PMD) has found a way to train highly skilled biomed technicians in his specialized school, and he also makes these technicians available to all hospitals if and when needed. They could also be hired by these hospitals if necessary. IKE SENERES/09088877282/12-29-2023