Typically, as much as 50 percent of medical equipment in developing country health facilities is out of service. Hospitals may lack the infrastructure needed for preventive maintenance or repair to keep equipment in service. Manuals may be missing or in the wrong language. WHO estimates that as much as 50 percent of donated medical equipment does not work—it may not be screened adequately before shipment or may be incompatible with the local power supply. The negative impact on the ability of health care providers to do their job is tremendous. Equipment problems, however, are generally viewed as an unavoidable feature of the developing country setting and to our knowledge, no international health program has thought to make biomedical engineering support integral to their partnerships with countries.

We Invite Collaboration with Global Health Organizations to address these problems to address these problems and support health care by ensuring functioning, appropriate equipment and by building capacity in health technology management, including equipment maintenance and other services. A partnership of the kind proposed would be ground-breaking. The result would be reliable technologies for diagnosis and treatment.

EWH can create and manage comprehensive support tailored to local need that utilizes all of the following activities in a carefully managed program to promote sustainable capacity.

(a) Work with US charities managing donated medical equipment to create medical equipment donation streams for needy hospitals. We mobilize student members of EWH chapters in US universities to evaluate and repair equipment (under the guidance of a faculty or professional engineer) prior to shipment

• Undertake detailed evaluations of hospitals and other health care facilities to determine their needs for equipment, and the development of capacity for equipment repair, planned preventive maintenance and health technology management (three levels of increasing sophistication)
• Plan responses to those needs to be managed by EWH
• Identify essential needs for tools and supplies for equipment maintenance and repair
• Repair equipment
• Train local staff and work with hospital leadership to establish infrastructure and systems
• Work with ministry of health officials to improve large-scale health technology management

(b) Arrange short-term visits by experienced professional engineers to countries to:

(c) Arrange long-term (6 months to one year) visits by interns (student alumni of the EWH summer programs, which train students in providing support to equipment repair and maintenance in resource-poor settings) to hospitals where they install and repair equipment, train the staff, take inventory, solve problems and perform other engineering duties

(d) Arrange short-term (workshop) and long-term training of local technical staff and engineers through the training programs of our partner organizations

Funding

This support, tailored to the needs of the situation and country, is provided on a fee-for-service basis. EWH can also work with counterparts and partner organizations to seek funding from a third party to cover the costs. Overall, EWH is very cost-effective. Depending on the size and duration of the program, engineering support can work out at less than $50 per hour.

Competitiveness

There is no comparable organization able to offer this support in as cost-effective a way as EWH.