Ensuring Your Pump is Maintained Correctly

Pumps can easily be overlooked but it’s important that the systems are regularly reviewed to ensure maximum efficiency. When systems are regularly maintained they are less likely to fail, but we do come across situations where emergency work is often needed for those which haven’t been serviced in a while.

We’ve recently completed work with a hospital who called us at 9am in the morning, after their second pump in their twin head heating pump system failed. Their first pump was already out for repair with their existing supplier. This meant no heating in one of their hospital’s wings. To add to the challenge, the second failed pump was no longer in production and spares were limited.

The site was 90 minutes away from our workshop but we were able to visit by midday and after a thorough assessment of the system, we were able to recommend a suitable replacement for emergency next-day delivery and installation.

It is vital that healthcare facilities understand the importance of having a reliable and regularly maintained solution in place. We work on many emergency projects with hospitals and these can often involve situations where patient operations are at risk due to faulty systems.

A failed heating pump at another hospital put almost 20 operations at risk when it failed on a Friday afternoon, with operations scheduled for the next morning. Fortunately, we made it to site the same day to examine the failure and diagnose that a new inverter was needed.

For this particular project, we worked proactively within our supplier network and managed to order, receive and begin installation of the new inverter the same evening. The unit was then programmed, tested and commissioned by 9pm the same day.

The prospective complications and knock-on effects of cancelling the surgeries could have been potentially catastrophic for the hospital and the patients who were waiting for serious appointments. All 20 operations went ahead smoothly.

While we are able to offer rapid response solutions and can adapt our expertise to most environments, we need to encourage the individuals responsible for looking after hospital pump systems to ensure that they are proactively maintaining their pumps onsite. It’s our responsibility to advise on the most up to date and efficient systems that they could be using. A proactive maintenance programme is much cheaper in the long run compared to an emergency repair which is very costly.

Equipment which isn’t maintained is more likely to fail catastrophically, whereas maintained equipment can be monitored and worked on long before an issue becomes a major problem. The concept of maintenance is to reduce ongoing costs and downtime, and to provide peace of mind that our customer’s systems can reliably provide flow how they need it.