Yesterday we went to the Physical Assets Management (PAM) Department at QECH. It was a very enlightening visit. One of the engineers there, a man named Joseph, graciously spent two hours showing us around the warehouse, talking with us about commonly broken devices, and generally giving us insight into the inner workings of PAM. I was hoping that the visit would provide inspiration for at least one design project for us to work on this summer, but I came away with more ideas than we could possibly finish and a huge amount of respect for the work the PAM engineers do.
According to the Malawian government website, “[PAM’s] major mandate is to ensure that all physical assets i.e. infrastructure and equipment are both available and functional in all the government health institutions.” (1) The PAM office we visited today is one of four regional offices in Malawi which collectively serve 33 hospitals and over 400 health centers. They must do all of this within a very limited budget and staff, and regularly must compete with other departments for the procurement of resources. (For example, in lieu of equipment or components to fix medical devices, the hospital often elects to allocate their budget towards more immediately needed items like medicines.)
More frustrating perhaps than a flat out lack of resources, however, was the massive collection of devices and components that had been donated to the hospital but could not be used. For example, Joseph showed us a pile of donated syringe pumps that are unusable because they did not come with consumables and lack the proper transformers. He told us at this point all they were good for was selling for scraps, in which case you could get 50 kwacha (about $0.11) for 10 syringe pumps.
As far as project ideas go, one of the promising ones is for a device to prevent the overflow of suction machines. Sister Florence, one of the nurses from Chatinkha Ward, also told us this was a large problem for the nurses. In their current state, the hospital’s suction machines collect bodily fluids into a jar, but the machine continues to produce suction even after the jar is full. This causes fluids to be sucked into the machine which sometimes induces irreparable damage to the machine. A project to combat this problem would be some kind of alarm for the nurses that would indicate when the jar was nearly full, or maybe even some sort of self-regulating system that switched the machine off when the jar was full. Other ideas revolved around the oxygen concentrators, one of the more frequently broken devices at QECH. An oxygen concentrator project could be as simple as producing clear and effective signage to warn against dangers like getting the concentrators wet, or it could be much more involved like modifying/replacing the molecular sieve beds which are a common source of failure for the overall device.
In any case, we haven’t picked a design project just yet, (we are going to discuss all of our ideas together today,) but needless to say I’m excited about the prospect of working closely with PAM to create a device for which there is a demonstrated need.
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(1) For more info about PAM and their mission statement, visit the Malawi government site link included here: https://www.malawi.gov.mw/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=54&Itemid=84