Maintenance Policies Optimization of Medical Equipment in a Health Care Organization

Background

For a long time, maintenance has been understood as part of the work that encompassed only the repairing breakdowns occurring in the machines and therefore, the employer included it as an economic burden to bear. However, this concept has progressively evolved over time until nowadays that is considered as a productive activity of the organization. Therefore, the role of maintenance has gained great interest and importance. Improving maintenance in a company is seen as an investment that will have a positive impact on quality and availability of the product as well as on productivity of the organization (Alrabghi & Tiwari, 2016).

It is common to consider in literature (see Dekker, 1996; Scarf, 1997; Eti, Ogaji, & Probert, 2006; and Hamdi, Oweis, Zraiq, & Sammour, 2012), that maintenance is the function responsible for ensuring availability of equipment and machines of a company; that is, it is associated with a set of actions that aim at preserving the assets (equipment and facilities) of the company during the period of useful life of these. Based on the criteria developed by cited authors above, the definition of maintenance is set as the range of activities performed to a system, equipment or component to ensure that it continues to perform desired functions within an operational context given at the lowest possible cost. The main objective is to preserve its function, good operating conditions, to optimize performance and to increase the useful life, by ensuring optimal investment of resources.