Plant maintenance in hospitals facilities

Maintenance is crucial in hospitals, where potential systems failures can have a significant impact on patients. An hospital is a complex asset because of the co-existence of multiple areas and interaction among health-related and non-health-related activities. The central hypothesis is that the appropriate maintenance procedure depends on served spaces and plants. Therefore, the research aims at establishing a correlation between the operational criticalities of each area and critical elements of plants to improve and optimize the execution of maintenance activities. The analysis is based on three steps. Firstly, the identification of criteria aimed at defining the plants criticality in correlation with the ways in which spaces are served and, moreover, definition of criteria for spaces classification based on performed activities. Last step is the description of components through two categories of factors. The first refers to analysis of design and functioning aspects of plants; the second is related to components functioning and deterioration. This correlation among "criticality index" and "health index" for all components provides indications on modalities and priorities for extraordinary interventions. Relative weights were attributed through the consultation with hospital technical office. The proposed maintenance management was applied in a hospital made up of 65000 squared-meters to include it in the informatic system that is currently used for repairs. This new maintenance management has the purpose of providing indications for maintenance strategies by considering contemporary nature of functional spaces, activities design characteristics and health state of them. The implementation into the informatic system and its check will be developed in future.