Establishing the priority of equipment inspections

This article outlines the essential elements of the priority assignment system used by the Clinical Engineering Department at Union Memorial Hospital. By using the department's experience and the professional judgment of its members, choices have been made to discriminate between types of equipment, and so to clearly establish the relative importance of the many different equipment inspections performed by department personnel. Relative priorities have been calculated and communicated to department employees and to others in the hospital who can help the department complete its assigned tasks. Measures have also been developed to show how well the department's actual performance meets its assigned overall objectives.