In an increasingly litigious environment, the NHS is looking hard at its asset estate and working to improve its planned proactive and reactive maintenance activity to minimise risk.
Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust has invested in Real Asset Management’s fixed asset register to create a single asset view across its finance, medical electronics and estates departments.
This consolidated source of asset information, that includes in-depth maintenance history and highly-effective maintenance management, is enabling the Trust to improve its asset management and efficiently allocate resources to the highest priority devices through automated Adjusted Equipment Management Ratings. In addition, in-depth analysis into the total cost of ownership is enabling the Trust to optimise asset value.
Critically, the Trust has passed its most recent NHS Litigation Authority audit and has streamlined its asset management processes, from capital asset reconciliation to the use of mobile maintenance, to significantly reduce its manual overhead and deliver a quantifiable return on investment.
Managing risk exposure
“The Trust recognised it needed to introduce systems to allow it to improve its asset management to a standard that was appropriate to the NHS Litigation Authority’s guidance,” commented Winstone Gondwe, medical equipment manager.
The Trust needed to put in place a system that provided not only a comprehensive list of assets, from X-ray machines to infusion pumps and beds, but which also included a full maintenance history behind each asset to provide the Trust with immediate access to asset performance information should any litigation arise.
“Every asset must be maintained in line with clearly defined safety guidelines,” Winstone Gondwe continued. “Without detailed, auditable, proactive preventative and reactive maintenance information, the Trust cannot demonstrate that the equipment has been correctly maintained.”
Improving Asset Insight
One of the main problems facing the Trust was the lack of a good asset register and maintenance management system within the Medical Electronics department. While the Trust’s Finance department had been using a fixed asset register from Real Asset Management (RAM) for six years to successfully manage capital depreciation, the Medical Electronics department’s attempts to deploy a different maintenance and facilities management solution had, left users still reliant on spreadsheets.
With around 11,000 live assets at any one time, all requiring planned preventative and reactive maintenance, a manual spreadsheet-based approach was inadequate. While there were clear operational benefits to be gained from creating a single consolidated asset register across the Trust by extending the use of RAM’s fixed asset register to the medical electronics department, a key consideration was the functionality of the maintenance management technology.
One of the key benefits is that RAM provides up to 100 user-definable fields against every asset record, enabling the Trust to implement a system that reflects existing information models and terminology. In addition, the Trust was keen to explore the benefits of mobile maintenance using PDAs. Job work orders can be automatically uploaded onto the PDA and the engineers can update the job status directly onto the device. Even if they are working on one of the remote sites without access to the Trust’s wireless network, the system will automatically synchronise as soon as they are back in range, updating the RAM database.
“Providing the Trust’s six medical engineers with job work orders on a PDA rather than on paper significantly streamlines the maintenance process,” said Winstone Gondwe. “In the past, support staff have had to manually re-key information concerning more than 70 jobs each day. The mobile solution completely removes that overhead.”
He continued: “With the huge emphasis on cost cutting across the NHS, RAM provides the ability to drive down back office costs while improving the quality of service delivery.”
For further information, please contact:
Karen Conneely
Real Asset Management
Tel: +44 (0)1689 892100
Email : kconneely@ramplc.com
Web : www.realassetmgt.co.uk
