Kara Centre for Aged Care, NSW (1)

The Maintenance Management System at Kara Centre for Aged Care in Epping, NSW was developed by the Maintenance Supervisor as a tool to improve the facility and move away from reactive maintenance and implement preventative maintenance schedules and trend corrective maintenance history by date and equipment type.

The system was developed utilising concepts and research carried out by The Hunter Water Corporation in the late 90s and adapted for use in the aged care setting using equipment maintenance needs, statutory regulations and maintenance requests from staff and residents as a guide for what is needed.

The program is responsive to the needs of the facility and all repairs and maintenance can be tracked and a history of the equipment called up to assist with decision making when replacement is needed.

Preventative maintenance means that equipment downtime has improved causing less distress and delay to residents' lives. Lifters are rarely out of service, dishwashers, washing machines and dryers are kept in good working order. Wheelchairs and roll aides are included in the system as a customer service to assist residents to maintain their independence.

The maintenance management system has now been developed into a complete package with monthly schedules over a four week period, three monthly and six monthly schedues. Service agreement and regulatory requirements are also an integral part of the schedule.

These schedules are linked to detail worksheets and corrective action sheets and this part of the package has been developed over the past 12 months.

Other functions of the system (database) are to log contractors' work and provide reports for contractor evaluations, collect maintenance history from preventative, corrective and contractor data files and for reports and trending.

In the early part of 2006 the program was made available on a network service for sister facilities in the Hunter to access and use within their own facilities and a procedures manual was developed and published.

The next step is to develop key performance indicators and  benchmark against the other Hunter facilities.