Embedding private-sector operations experts into rural hospitals to help build a culture of high performance and biomedical engineering excellence.
Touch has reimagined how African hospitals manage medical equipment and technology. Our HTM program embeds private-sector mentors into hospital operations departments, to introduce O&M (operations and maintenance) tools and strategies.
HTM draws on private-sector best practices, such as 5s, workflow analysis, and visual management tools. Our program re-trains and re-deploys the existing hospital staff, and supports hospitals to transform how they manage and maintain medical equipment – which saves countless lives.
Functioning medical equipment and technology is indispensable to effective medical care. Yet, the WHO estimates that between 30 and 50 percent of medical devices in sub-Saharan Africa are broken.
Biomedical engineering and equipment management function as the heart of any hospital – but without resources and capacity to maintain, repair, and deploy equipment in patient care, investments in all other areas of patient care are compromised. More importantly,lives are at stake.
Touch has partnered with world-class private sector companies to borrow from their ‘playbooks’ on O&M (operations and maintenance). We embed private-sector mentors into hospitals for a period of 2-3 years, so that they can share expertise, introduce new ways of working, and support a mindset shift – all based on the science of operations management.
Our HTM model was tested and implemented over a three-year period in Tanzania, creating a Centre of Excellence in Biomedical Engineering at Bugando Medical Center (BMC), a 1,000-bed tertiary referral hospital in Tanzania’s Lake Zone. By employing this embedded-mentors approach, we achieved a 30% increase in operating theatre uptime, an 80% decrease in equipment repair time, and improved care pathways for 350,000 patients annually.
Almost 3 years after the conclusion of the program, these levels of equipment management and maintenance have been sustained, proving that through a focus on change-management, the medical equipment crisis can be addressed.
Touch has partnered with world-class private sector companies to borrow from their ‘playbooks’ on O&M (operations and maintenance). We embed private-sector mentors into hospitals for a period of 2-3 years, so that they can share expertise, introduce new ways of working, and support a mindset shift – all based on the science of operations management.
Our HTM model was tested and implemented over a three-year period in Tanzania, creating a Centre of Excellence in Biomedical Engineering at Bugando Medical Center (BMC), a 1,000-bed tertiary referral hospital in Tanzania’s Lake Zone. By employing this embedded-mentors approach, we achieved a 30% increase in operating theatre uptime, an 80% decrease in equipment repair time, and improved care pathways for 350,000 patients annually.
Almost 3 years after the conclusion of the program, these levels of equipment management and maintenance have been sustained, proving that through a focus on change-management, the medical equipment crisis can be addressed.