Maintaining your healthcare facility’s medical equipment is vital for the health and well-being of your patients. The last thing a medical professional wants to deal with is faulty, malfunctioning equipment, especially in the middle of an examination or a crucial procedure. If you’re interested in learning about the reasons why maintaining your medical equipment is important, keep reading.
It Saves You Money
A lack of preventative maintenance can lead to equipment failure. The cost of repairing your malfunctioning, failed equipment can be expensive. Depending on the piece of equipment, the type of problem, and the extent of the issue, repair costs can range anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars. By performing preventative maintenance, you’re less likely to encounter major issues with your equipment. This can save you money on the cost of a service technician or other repair professional.
It Guarantees Safety
Another reason why maintaining your medical equipment is important is that it makes things safer for your patients. You don’t want your equipment to malfunction in the middle of an examination or procedure. In the best-case scenario, you’ll have a patient that needs to wait, be transferred, or reschedule their appointment. In the worst-case scenario, however, machine failure could pose a serious risk to your patient’s health. If your patient has an important procedure delayed or faces serious injury or death because of preventable errors or equipment failure, you could be held liable.
It Improves Your Equipment’s Efficiency
Accuracy is a crucial part of healthcare. If your equipment lacks the correct medical equipment labels, or is improperly calibrated, faulty, or failing, it could lead to a misdiagnosis. If a patient is misdiagnosed, you might end up prescribing incorrect medicine or recommending an invasive procedure for a problem that doesn’t exist. If your equipment is well-maintained, you’re less likely to experience errors or receive inaccurate results. Taking care of your ultrasound machines and transducer probes, for example, lowers the risk of artifacts interfering with the imaging and diagnostic process.
Of course, even with preventative maintenance, your equipment can still break or fail. Knowing when to repair or replace your equipment is important. In some cases, replacement is the cheapest, most efficient option. But in the case of equipment that’s normally sold secondhand, such as transducer probes, choosing between repair and replacement can be harder.
Thankfully, if you’re proactive in maintaining and caring for your facility’s equipment, you won’t have to make this choice very often. Preventative maintenance increases the longevity of your equipment, which means you’ll be able to use it for months, if not years, to come.
BONUS TIP: Be Sure to Protect Your Employees
Radiation exposure is a major workplace hazard in the medical field, which is why it’s important to make sure that not only is your equipment up to par, but that you are providing the necessary protective gear for your employees, including x ray protection. After all, what good is having well-maintained equipment, if you have no one to actually run it?
