Meeting tightening standards and regulations is critical for health care FM. But ensuring facilities and equipment maintenance is delivered to a consistent standard across multiple sites is a huge challenge. Here are 5 tips for mobilising a CAFM that can help you meet the demands of the modern healthcare industry but not get overwhelmed in the process or lost in the admin.
1. Streamline your reactive maintenance
Healthcare FM need the tools to manage urgent reactive maintenance in a consistent, reliable and auditable way.
When you’ve got facilities failure in a healthcare setting it needs dealing with immediately. There's no working around it. If you've got a leak into your operating theatre you can't just work around that. You can't put some cones up and say ‘just avoid it’ like you would in a retail store.” James Clarke, Head of Property, SpaMedica
You should choose CAFM tools and a partner that will help you:
- Automatically triage and prioritise work requests
- Easily Schedule and reschedule engineer time
- Manage comms with engineers and contractors
- Dispatch engineers and track progress on each job
- Record maintenance activities centrally for audit
CQC compliance requires you to react in a timely way to keep facilities functioning in a way that ensures patients’ safety. This will vary according to the nature of the failure and the equipment involved. Critically it also requires records to be kept to demonstrate you’re doing this
Make sure you work with a partner who can help you build out the workflows that work for you, triggering the right response flow, alerting the right people to get the job done and recording the outcomes for future audit.
2. Centralise your helpdesk for safe and scalable growth
On a national scale delivering this kind of highly responsive service to a consistent standard needs centralisation. It requires a single help desk able to organise and distribute tasks to the right engineers locally, within the right time frame and to keep track of delivery
Our business has got facilities from Cornwall up to Cumbria and everything in between. There was no way that we could manage this spread with our small team in the North East physically visiting properties to ensure quality was being maintained. We had to find a system that would allow us to manage contractors and engineers effectively and efficiently.” James Clarke, Head of Property, SpaMedica
3. Automate your PPM process for complex maintenance regimes
Specialist equipment with life-saving functions needs regular maintenance to ensure it will always work as expected.
You need the tools that will help you schedule and automate these specific maintenance regimes, so vital servicing activities aren’t missed and important data does not go unrecorded.
Make sure engineers can take photos and upload them to the asset record, to show future engineers what they have done. This will help others identify repeated failure points and help the business make an informed decision on whether/when to repair or replace.
Look for a system that lets you set up maintenance schedules with notifications for engineers and reminders for managers to chase up outstanding visits and records.
Having a secure and searchable asset register that the whole business can refer to will help you troubleshoot issues, as well as respond to CQC requests on demand:
We wanted to be able to pull up the latest service certificate for any piece of equipment showing when the asset passed its service” James Clarke, Head of Property, SpaMedica
4. Centralise documentation
Make sure your chosen CAFM helps you organise and structure data in your system for search.
CQC compliance requires complete control over documentation in sometimes unexpected ways.
The CQC can ask you about anything that takes their interest, if they think it's relevant. So for example, if youve acquired a new site, they may need you to prove that you have a lease of the building and that you have the right to occupy that building so the risk of future care is not disrupted...” James Clarke, Head of Property, SpaMedica
5. Make sure your system can control and prove your CQC compliance
Make sure your CAFM partner can help you set up a trackable maintenance management system that your team can understand and will use to make their life easier and get their jobs done. If the system lets them record their attendance and make notes in the most intuitive way - you’ll have a real time record of events for your future compliance audits.
Choose a system that will:
- Get the right people to the right place at the right time to fix/ maintain facilities and assets
- Share the information your people need to do their job wherever they are
- Record maintenance activities/communication trails in real time for future audit
- Structure key data and documentation so it is easily discoverable in future
To achieve it just requires a flexible and intuitive CAFM optimised for mobile that can be rapidly planned out and configured with the help of a supportive software partner.
