Preventive Maintenance: Does Your System Work for You?

Anyone in the EMS industry knows that a good preventive maintenance program is critical to the safety of both patients and providers. That’s where the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) standards come in.

“The 1915 standard covers preventive maintenance, and agencies have to have a program,” says Terry Eckert of the Emergency Vehicle Technician Certification Commission, Inc. “This standard helps you develop out-of-service criteria, such as how big that crack in the windshield can be before you have to call it out of service. The standard also says that maintenance personnel must be qualified, and it goes into detail about what those qualifications entail.”

Following NFPA guidelines also means properly documenting vehicle maintenance, says Eckert.

“Documentation should include what repair work needs to be done on your vehicles and what should take priority,” he explains. “A good program should also tell you when preventive maintenance is due and how much money is being spent on each vehicle. And, it protects you against liability. If something should happen, you have documentation to show when the brakes were last checked or any other work was done.”

EMS personnel who drive ambulances are key to cluing in maintenance technicians to potential problems, says Eckert.

“The technicians should be relying on ambulance drivers 100% to keep them informed about problems,” he says. “The technicians don’t see the vehicles every day. They may see them once every three months for a general check, so a driver/operator is the first step in preventive maintenance. That driver needs to know the proper procedure for how to report something he or she thinks needs instant attention, or attention down the road, and the technician who’s going to do the maintenance should have the logbook to see if anything has been going on for the last three months. If two or three driv­ers have written about the same problem in the logbook, the technician can now get it fixed.”

Eckert suggests keeping the logbook in the ambulance at all times so it’s always available for the technicians when they need it.

—MN