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Zambia has low capacity to maintain hospital equipment, says Prof Zaman

Zambia has low capacity to maintain hospital equipment, says Prof Zaman
By Agness Changala
Wed 23 June 2010, 04:01 CAT

ZAMBIA has low capacity to maintain or implement expensive equipment in the hospitals, a leading expert in biomedical engineering research and education at Boston University assistant professor Muhammad Hamid Zaman has observed.

To address the above challenge, University of Zambia (UNZA) School of Medicine, School of Engineering, University Teaching Hospital (UTH) and the Centre of International Health and Disease in Zambia (CIHDZ) held an international meeting on Monday.

In an interview during the Biomedical Engineering Summit (BES), Zaman said whenever equipment went down, it was difficult to maintain because there were no trained personnel in this area.

“And as a result, the country is spending more money on maintaining the equipment than it was bought,” Zaman said.

He said one of the problems identified was that there was no local manufactures of the various hospital machinery needed adding that they were all imported from UK, India, China and the United States.

Zaman said they wanted to build capacity so that people could come up with solutions to these problems and be able to maintain the equipment.

He said currently, there was no department in the school of engineering or medicine that trained people to properly manage the hospital equipment.

“In addition, hospital equipment worth millions of dollars is never used to its full capacity or maintained appropriately due to lack of engineers equipped with appropriate training,” he said.

Zaman said health care problems in Zambia suffered not only from lack of financial resources but also lack of engineering capacity to develop new solutions, local devices and rapid diagnostics.

He said the goal of this ambitious summit was to develop concrete solutions to healthcare challenges in Zambia.

Labels: HEALTHCARE, MUHAMMAD HAMID ZAMAN

posted by MrK @ 5:56 PM