BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING
Facilitating the clinician’s ‘real life-saving work’
Michael Brown, a Biomedical Services Technician based at Christchurch Public Hospital, a 550-bed tertiary acute healthcare facility which is the largest teaching and research hospital in the South Island of New Zealand, discusses his day-to-day job, and the important role such engineering personnel play in enabling clinicians to do ‘the real-life-saving work’. The article is based on a presentation he gave at the IHEA (Institute of Healthcare Engineering Australia) Healthcare Facilities Management Conference 2019 in Sydney last October.
Christchurch Public Hospital.
The city of Christchurch is located on a broad plain, geographically positioned between the Pacific Ocean and the Southern Alps of New Zealand. Locals sometimes brag that it is one of the few places in the world where you can go skiing and surfing on the same day. Based on an agricultural economy, it is a city with a growing population, currently at just under 400,000 people. As many of you may know, Christchurch has been through some significant events in the last few years. Of most relevance to us today was a 6.2 Richter scale earthquake that occurred on 22 February 2011; 185 people died as a result of the earthquake, and the face of the city was changed forever. I must confess that when putting this talk together, I was going to show some slides of Christchurch right after the earthquakes, but while there was no shortage of images to display, looking at them now, even eight years later, is something I struggle to do. One of the
Cathedral Square in Christchurch.
photos that I will show is of the National Earthquake Monument, constructed to remember those killed by the earthquake.
No one in Christchurch left unaffected
I was personally fortunate not to be harmed as a consequence of the quake and the aftershocks that followed. My family were safe, and my home sustained very minor damage. However, no one living in Christchurch was left unaffected by the earthquakes.
The thing that probably affected me personally in the greatest way was changes at my place of work, Christchurch Public Hospital. I can recall as clearly as yesterday walking to work several weeks after the main earthquake, and, two minutes before arriving at my workshop, receiving a call on my mobile. It was my supervisor, who, in his casual, laid back manner, instructed me not to enter our work building. When I enquired as to why not, his jocular but accurate
This article, entitled ‘Clinical Engineering – How Biomeds make hospitals safer’, first appeared in the July 2020 issue of Healthcare Facilities, the journal of the Institute of Healthcare Engineering Australia (IHEA). HEJ would like to thank the author, the IHEA, and the magazine’s publisher, Adbourne Publishing, for allowing its reproduction here in slightly edited form.
reply was ‘because the roof might fall on you’. We were quickly moved to a new work area, significantly smaller than our original workshop.
Since the quakes, living in Christchurch has been a struggle. Constant roadworks, building repairs, and staff relocations, have been frustrating at best. There were times when the traffic routes across the city would change on a daily basis due to roadworks – sometimes when visiting medical centres as part of my work duties, I would not be able to take the same route across the city twice in as many days as routes changed. Hospitals and medical centres have moved, rebuilt, or shut, and the staff I work with have been relocated as many as four times, to list just a few frustrations, and, of course, the city itself was stuffed, or, to use the colloquial phrase of the day, ‘munted’.
An improving picture
Fortunately, while the recovery has been long and painful, things are now improving. The city centre, or CBD, was, for many people, a place where you would not normally go unless you had to. Before the earthquakes, I could count on one hand the number of times I visited the city centre in the 10 years I had lived there. One of my favourite quotes that came out
August 2020 Health Estate Journal 23
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