BACKGROUND The poor maintenance of equipment and inadequate supplies of drugs and other items contribute to the low quality of maternity services often found in rural settings in low- and middle-income countries, and raise the risk of adverse patient outcomes through delaying care provision. We aim to describe staff experiences of providing maternal and neonatal care in rural health facilities ...

Equipment logistics, maintenance, and repair are important aspects of construction equipment management. A well-managed equipment fleet helps reduce downtime, as well as total maintenance and repair costs. With quickly growing fleets of equipment, large contractors tend to divert the maintenance and repair of equipment from equipment managers to project managers. As a result, the equipment mana...

The design of anaesthesia equipment for use in hospitals in the developing world must take into account the local conditions, particularly whether reliable supplies of compressed oxygen and electricity are available. Designs should ensure that maintenance is feasible locally. International standards should encourage the design of suitable equipment to ensure safe anaesthesia for patients worldw...

OBJECTIVES This report presents estimates on the availability of pediatric services, expertise, and supplies for treating pediatric emergencies in U.S. hospitals. METHODS The Emergency Pediatric Services and Equipment Supplement (EPSES) was a self-administered questionnaire added to the 2002-03 National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS). NHAMCS samples non-Federal, short-stay a...

BACKGROUND Maternal mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa remains a challenge with estimates exceeding 1,000 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in some countries. Successful prevention of maternal deaths hinges on adequate and quality emergency obstetric care. In addition to skilled personnel, there is need for a supportive environment in terms of essential drugs and supplies, equipment, and a r...

In the FAIR control system the SCU (Scalable Control Unit, an industry PC with a bus system for interfacing electronics) is the standard front-end controller for power supplies. The FESA-framework is used to implement front-end software in a standardized way, to give the user a unified look on the installed equipment. As we were dealing with different power converters and thus with different SC...

Power systems for data-processing and communication equipment used in mission-critical applications that require high system availability must be implemented with fault-tolerant architectures. Generally, these fault-tolerant power architectures require that the power supplies built into data-processing/communication equipment are capable of operating from two different ac power sources. In this...