Jean Marie Takam, biomedical engineer at the Yaounde Central Hospital, talks on the challenges of maintaining hospital equipment.

What are some of the problems faced in ensuring the maintenance of equipment in the hospital?

Maintenance in the Yaounde Central Hospital is very vast and structured. The maintenance service is divided into different pools of activities with a head of department at the head of each pool. The difficulties are many. First of all the equipment that we have are old. The equipment is always breaking down. After repairing a machine, we are called back to repair it again one week after.

The second difficulty is that "after sales" services are not assured. When the hospital buys an equipment, the suppliers do not usually supply with the all the necessary technical documents. That creates a lot of problems for us when we have to intervene. Another problem is that the process for the purchase of spare parts is slow. When we signal that there is a machine that is faulty, the process is long and takes time.

That is why when a machine gets bad, it cannot be repaired on time. We are not at fault because often the supplier cannot supply while sometimes you have look for the spare parts which are often scarce. As a result of all these, we cannot do our job efficiently.

When equipment is bad, what do you do?

When equipment is bad, I go to the scene and find out from the user to tell me how the equipment functions and how the fault came about. It is from his account that I carry out my diagnosis. And once the diagnosis has been carried out, we find the parts which are bad and we inform the hierarchy of the hospital. We look for a contractor who will submit an application for supplies. When the application is validated, he supplies the spare parts and we mount the part on the equipment.

Do you have training programmes for young staff as far as maintenance is concerned?

Training has been a major preoccupation of the hierarchy. There is the continuous training of personnel that is being organised by the hierarchy. For now, we are training young interns who come from different schools. We teach them how to do maintenance work. But for those of us who are already working in the hospital, we have not yet benefited from the continuous training programme but we are still waiting. The hierarchy is doing everything to ensure that it will be effective.