In an article based on a presentation at last month’s Institute of Hospital Engineering Australia (IHEA) Management Conference in Brisbane, Kim Bruton, chief engineer, MIHEA, NZIHE, CHCFM, of Northeast Health Wangaratta (NHW) in Victoria, describes some of the interesting experiences, challenges, and wider lessons learned, during his first five years as facility manager at the major referral health service for the north-east Victoria region.
This serves some 28 townships beyond the boundaries of the Rural City of Wangaratta, and has a catchment population of approximately 90,000 people.
We all, over our time, deal with some form of failing infrastructure, inadequate investment, and unplanned emergencies, within the health service. This paper is a light-hearted piece that chronicles my first five years as the most recent facility manager at my local health service.
Since 2010 I have dealt with incidents involving a failed chiller, emergency generator capacity issues, electrical main switch failures, a gas explosion, serious storm damage, a direct lightning strike, and floods. This is an attempt to demonstrate the road to recovery on each of these challenges to enable compliance and support future-proofing, which I have done throughout the article by posing a number of questions based on scenarios faced, and the way we addressed these.
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