Queen’s Medical Centre
Company: DatastreamCustomer: Queen’s Medical CentreWith over 6000 employees, 1200 beds and 25 operating theatres spread across 190,000 square metres of floorspace, the Queen’s Medical Centre is one of the largest, purpose-built teaching hospitals in Europe. It consists of a number of departments including University Hospital, the University of Nottingham Medical School and the Nottingham School of Nursing and Division of Midwifery.While it complements the traditional core disciplines, it continually develops and adapts to the changing nature of medical care and professional development. Its unique and innovative approach to the integrated nature of medical science has gained an international reputation.
The Challenge
The maintenance department, which has over 100 staff, is responsible for all routine and breakdown maintenance within the Trust’s remit. Such is the critical nature of medicine and surgery, this service is provided 24 hours a day, 365 days each and every year, and can involve the repair of steam-raising boilers and steam distribution to the monitoring of theatre equipment and medical gas services. Perhaps the biggest challenge for the department is to make an inadequate maintenance budget stretch as far as possible while ensuring that the most critical of services continue to be maintained to a safe and adequate standard without endangering the safety of staff and patients.”MP2 stood head and shoulders above the systems we considered,” says Peter Slater, estates information manager at Queens Medical Centre. “It’s functionality, flexibility and capacity to integrate with the Trust’s existing IT strategy, which is based around Microsoft SQL Server, were crucial to our final decision.
“”It became apparent that we had to replace our existing system, as it was neither Y2K compatible nor could it be updated sufficiently to meet the increasing maintenance needs of the Trust. It was vital that we found something which was not only able to meet our critical requirements but also evolve with the department which has a £120 million asset turnover and receives 140 maintenance requests each day.”
The Solution
Following careful consideration of several products available on the market, the Queens Medical Centre selected MP2, a Datastream maintenance management solution which has been developed from the shop floor upwards, with a great deal of input from customers across the world.A Microsoft Windows based package, MP2 is a completely integrated maintenance management package that enables you to organise and track inventory, manage equipment costs, track equipment history, schedule preventive maintenance tasks, maintain confidential labour records, allocate resources, generate work orders, requisition and purchase parts and project equipment failure.The critical corporate software, which will accommodate facilities of any size, either as a stand-alone system or on a client/server system, is available in 12 languages including Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hangul, Norwegian and Spanish. It also has a seamless upgrade capability and optional open system architecture providing a level of control which has contributed to making MP2 the choice of more maintenance professionals than any other maintenance management system in the world.
The Results
Since it was installed at the centre in March of 1999, the system has made a considerable impact on the centre’s operational efficiency including a reduction in equipment downtime, an increase in productivity, a decrease in inventory levels and a reduction in production cost. When construction is completed on a new £10 million ophthalmology unit later this year, MP2 will take full automated control of the centre’s maintenance facility.All assets from heating, mechanical equipment to sterilisers and operating theatre maintenance are organised by MP2. This allows the centre’s 20 end users to effectively manage job costings, reporting, billing, stock control and consumables against work, allowing the facility to meet more demands within the finances allocated.The system controls the allocation and scheduling of breakdown work and scheduled maintenance, manages the allocation of stock and advises for re-ordering. It is also used for work requests, work orders, purchasing control, inventory control, preventive maintenance tasks and data analysis.
Slater continues: “MP2 has empowered our staff allowing them the freedom to track, monitor and analyse all aspects of the Centre’s maintenance function more creatively and efficiently. We now have a system which addresses and anticipates the many problems faced in keeping a hospital maintenance facility operating effectively and cost-efficiently, making us a proactive and not a reactive unit.”In order to maintain the stability of the centre’s operational structure and to limit the possibility of disruption, the new system was introduced gradually, over a period of four to five months. During this time, Datastream worked closely with the QMC team, providing all software, installation, training and consulting in order to reduce equipment downtime.QMC’s Slater comments, “The support we received from Datastream was outstanding and played an essential part in the subsequent success of the system.
As part of the overall package, our staff received one week’s consultation for installation and migration, a week for training and a further week for post installation support and training.”
