A SURVAY OF MAINTENANCE AND COST OF MEDICAL EQUIPMENT IN HOSPITALS ASSOCIATED OF IRAN UNIVERSITY OF MEDICAL SCIENCES AND HEALTH SERVICES(2000-2001)

Medical equipment play an important role in the diagnosis, treatment and education of medical affairs. Each year a noteworthy volume of medical sets and equipments in hospitals become obsolete due to technical defects and lose their efficiency in a way that major parts of hospitals’ expenses are allocated for the supply, service and repair of this equipment. The outcome of such expenses are, finally, a gigantic scientific and economic losses that are imposed on the State’s health care and medical treatment. Present research is a cross sectional study for investigation of maintenance, service and care expenses of medical equipment of hospitals affiliated to Iran University of Medical Sciences. For this purpose, 284 cases of classified sampling regarding equipment and sets of affiliated hospitals with more than 5-year operational history were investigated. The means for preparing and compiling relevant data and information constituted an inquiry form which was distributed and completed by person in charge of inquiry and was used for analysis of the obtained information from descriptive and deductive statistics, as well as one-way variant analysis and Spirman coordinating coefficient. The results of the research showed that almost 60% of medical equipment of these hospitals had not at all been controlled or evaluated by the personnel of medical units and at none of the investigated hospitals there existed an engineering maintenance medical unit. In this research work the up-keep and maintenance of medical equipment relates to supply, repair and technical training of the sets and, on the whole, medical equipment of the studied hospitals had fairly a proper standard as follows: Repair service and maintenance: 29.6%, Supply of equipment: 26.1%, Educational and training aspects: 14.1 %. The variant analysis, too, showed that the average achieved points of the situation in which supply, repair and training of medical equipment were performed does not differ so much statistically when looked at it from international standards point of view. Almost 24% of the total amount of the hospitals’ budget are allocated for incurred expenses of supply, repair and technical training of medical equipment. On the average, the situation in which medical equipment of studied hospitals caused extra costs showed 74.6 % improper balance. Proportionate relation between supply and cost (r=0.35 and p<0.005) and between repair and cost (r = 0.15 and p<0.001) and between technical training and costs of medical equipment (p<0.000 and r=0.35), too, showed that there existed a meaningful relation between them. The overall outcome and result of this research work testifies to the fact that there exist lack of a proper planning system for the supply, repair, maintenance, technical training and the incurred costs of available medical equipment at Iran University of Medical Sciences and Health Services.