Safe patient handling equipment is essential to helping healthcare organizations meet their goals, both in preventing staff and patient injuries and in offering excellence in patient care. But the important task of choosing high-quality equipment does not end with purchase and installation. A strong preventative maintenance (PM) program is critical to providing assurance that your healthcare organization can meet its safe patient handling goals. Additionally, it helps ensure adherence to all regional, national or international compliance and regulatory requirements for your equipment.
Savaria’s PM program, Handicare Plus, helps to ensure that your safe patient handling equipment is maintained in reliable working order, supporting caregiver and patient safety and assisting your organization with meeting regulatory requirements and reducing liability and costs.
When it comes to safety, reliability is critical. Safe and reliable equipment is a major asset to healthcare organizations. If your safe patient handling equipment fails, the downstream effects can be time-consuming and costly.
Preventative maintenance programs allow you to be proactive, not reactive. Like anything mechanical, without routine maintenance and inspections of your patient handling equipment, your organization may miss opportunities to correct potential problems before they become mission critical.
Along with providing assurance that you can avoid the above challenges, a robust PM program has some core compliance benefits that ultimately help healthcare organization meet compliance and regulatory benchmarks and be prepared for audits.
Depending on your healthcare organization’s local regulatory bodies, your safe patient handling equipment is subject to required maintenance at regular intervals and may also have reporting requirements, especially if an injury occurs due to faulty equipment. This is true for the Occupation and Safety Health Administration (OSHA), OH&S and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS).
Adhering to these standards also helps you maintain facility accreditation and in some cases, meet benchmarks critical to reimbursement, such as Star Ratings for long-term care facilities in the United States. This can include key indicators such as patient safety ratings due to complications like falls with injury and pressure injuries — which could increase due to lack of functional equipment.
A good preventative maintenance program should go beyond routine inspections and servicing of equipment. Although these are key to an effective PM program, there are other elements you should also prioritize when choosing a PM program.
Handicare Plus offers premium support that goes beyond simple equipment maintenance. Savaria’s product categories span all safe handling needs, with research and clinically based equipment ranging from beds to ceiling and floor lifts, transfer aids, slings, and more.
Our factory-trained technicians are the experts on these products with hours of training in the field, ensuring your equipment is maintained according to manufacturer specifications and that your warranty is not voided by unauthorized repairs.
Tiered PM program plans are available to meet your organization’s budgetary requirements and equipment demands.
If you’re ready to learn more about Savaria’s Handicare Plus preventative maintenance program for your safe patient handling equipment, call 1- 877-3040-5438, and we’ll show you how we can help you stop worrying about equipment maintenance.
