Upgrade Your Commercial Stainless Steel HVAC Products and Ensure Proper Function
Excessive deferred maintenance can be downright dangerous, making the best possible patient care nearly impossible, especially if potential mechanical failure is looming ahead.
It’s an issue that facilities operations managers are tackling, but it also should be top-of-mind for hospital executives, too, because they’re responsible for providing the financial investment in the facility.
What is Deferred Maintenance?
Deferred maintenance is the name given to repairs that are delayed specifically due to budget limitations or lack of funding.
While deferred maintenance can be inevitable in certain situations, it puts healthcare facilities at risk, particularly when it applies to maintenance on their air filtration systems in clean rooms and critical environments. These areas require functioning vital equipment to serve their purposes and protect patients when they’re at their most vulnerable.
While it’s true that a high level of deferred maintenance can indicate that a facilities manager is doing well in terms of maintaining equipment and keeping it running, it does show an overall lack of investment in the facility.
But deferred maintenance is the last of seven maintenance categories to be concerned with; the six that occur prior to it can be just as important.
Six Additional Stages of Healthcare Infrastructure Maintenance
Before reaching the deferred maintenance stage, there are six steps facilities managers go through to keep equipment operational and up to date.
- Compliance: Anything required to ensure the facility meets regulatory requirements from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, The Joint Commission, or other regulatory bodies.
- General Operations: Simple building maintenance, such as changing light bulbs, ensuring faucets operate, and oiling door locks.
- Break/Fix: Repairs done to a single part on a ceiling diffuser or other piece of equipment, that is part of a larger system.
- Asset Failure: Occurs when an asset can no longer be repaired to restore full functionality.
- Planned Replacement: Understanding the useful life of equipment to track and schedule replacement before patient care or operations are affected.
- Preventative Maintenance: Maintenance done to prevent changes in performance and function, such as HEPA filter changes, cleaning, and more.
Developing a Strategy to Manage Deferred Maintenance
At some point, continually maintaining an asset that ultimately needs replacement becomes illogical and utilizes funding better spent on new equipment.
To know how long you can get by with maintenance and repairs, you need to understand how to prioritize maintenance based on the age of the equipment, the role it plays in your facility, and the area it serves. For example, in a hospital setting, equipment that directly affects patient care should be prioritized over equipment that solely serves administrative areas.
Another factor that some skilled facility managers take into account is energy savings. Often, it is possible to save energy by replacing equipment rather than continually repairing it. Updated, newer equipment tends to be more energy efficient than older, worn machinery.
As a result, replacing these mechanical components comes with more benefits than just operationality. Financial savings as a result of replacement provides a return on investment via cost-savings that essentially pays for the new equipment.
What Facilities Managers Can Do To Avoid Extensive Deferred Maintenance
The team who maintains hospital systems knows better than anyone the importance of investing in infrastructure. Thus, it becomes their responsibility to educate leadership and financial decision-makers about the components that systems require to function properly.
It isn’t always possible to get the funding necessary to replace aging components. But to know your leaders’ expectations for facilities maintenance and to help them understand replacement timelines and useful lifespans, means you are more likely to obtain the tools and equipment you need to keep everything running more smoothly.
Replace Commercial HVAC Equipment with Made-to-Order Products from AJ Manufacturing
Ensure functioning of your air distribution system by replacing dated and maintenance-deferred equipment, including stainless steel air outlets, return grilles, ceiling diffusers, HEPA filters, and more.
Choose the industry leader in the fabrication of commercial HVAC equipment, that uses the latest technology to produce consistent, airtight elements suitable for clean rooms, such as laboratories, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and operating theaters: AJ Manufacturing, located in Kansas City, Missouri, and shipping worldwide.
Contact AJ Manufacturing to place your custom order for critical environment HVAC equipment. Email our National Sales Manager directly at amyvanwagner@ajmfg.us, send us a message online, or give us a call at (816) 231-5522 to learn more about our products.