The Federal School of Biomedical Technology of the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH) is an engineering department made up of multidisciplinary engineers and technicians.
The Department provides these interdisciplinary technical services to the hospital in the first place and subsequently other sister institutions. It offers technical expertise and assistance to all departments of the hospital and its affiliates and seeks to ensure the safety and effectiveness of their scientific and medical instrumentation. She also runs a monotechnic established by the Federal Ministry of Health to train biomedical equipment technicians.
SERVICES PROVIDED
- Design and Construction: The School of biomedical technology aids the researchers and medical staff in the design, construction and modification of instrumentation to suit their need.
- REPAIR SERVICES: A malfunctioning equipment not only presents a possible hazard and false result when used, it is also a source of frustration to the staff and a source of lost time and money to the organization. A large proportion of the repairs necessary to a biomedical/laboratory equipment is handled by the biomedical engineers and technicians.
- Technical Education and Consultation: The UNTH School of Biomedical offers engineering consultation to the medical, teaching and research staff who use instrumentation in their work. We also instruct the medical and nursing personnel in the application and use of sophisticated scientific and medical instrumentation. From experience we found out that a major reason for equipment malfunction is as a result of equipment misuse by the user. To minimize this problem, periodic training for equipment users is organized by the department. The department also holds an academic/practical lecture every Thursday in which all technical staff are present.A staff engineer/technician or a resource person is given the opportunity to present topics on related equipment or important issues that is connected to our work.
- Periodic Testing/Preventive Maintenance Service: It is generally agreed and required that periodic inspection and calibration of equipment are prudent to the long life of the equipment. Experience indicates that periodic equipment inspection reduces breakdown and provides also some assurance that the equipment is functioning correctly.
- Initial Receiving, Acceptance Testing and Certification: Experience have shown that some new instrument/equipment (bought, borrowed or donated) to the hospital have some defects. Vast majority of these defects are minor and however a potential source of operational or safety problems. Testing biomedical equipment before final acceptance by the hospital is a task primarily for the biomedical engineering department.
- Selection, Evaluation, and Purchase Review: This department devotes part of its time to evaluation and consultation with the management in the selection of new equipment for the hospital to minimize repair costs and operational problems.
- Equipment Inventory: This department maintains an inventory of all the medical equipment in the hospital and on regular basis updates them as new ones are purchased and old ones are boarded.
- Documentation And Administration: The maintenance of appropriate test and repair record, ordering parts, handling correspondences related to repair work is an important aspect of our job.
- Electrical Safety Testing: This is one of the major important routine function of this biomedical engineering department.
- Training: The department runs a school of biomedical technology to train biomedical equipment technicians. It offers National Diploma in Biomedical Engineering Technology. The school also runs short courses on the following; Medical gas/vacuum and Compressors, CSSD equipment, Sterilizers and Autoclaves, Repair methods, Care and Use of biomedical/laboratory instrumentation, for other institutions. Occasionally the school organizes local and national workshops to update participants in their related skill.