Technical reconversion as alternative for developing countries: our experience

In Colombia, some international companies, or at least their representatives, used to sell pieces of equipment without much technical information, in order to make maintenance or not guarantee the replacement for a long period of time. In developing countries hospitals do not have enough budget to replace equipments every two or three years as may occur in developed ones. Besides, in 112 hospitals surveyed 79.52% of the maintenance department personnel had not obtained a high school degree. Meanwhile, during the period of 1974-1989 the Colombia government invested US $231,051,072 in biomedical and clinical equipment, US $19,722,821 in maintenance and US $55 million in replacements. Also, the training of 1300 people was planned for the period of 1990-1995. This training was not met. For all the above reasons the authors put emphasis in their Electronic Engineering students, mainly those of 8th semester (out of 10) to go to the hospitals to learn and to help. During 1991-1995 the authors have helped hospitals to save about US $5,000,000 in repairing, maintaining, rebuilding, redesigning and/or converting from analog to digital electronics biomedical or clinical equipments, because most of them are 60s, 70s or 80s technologies, few of them are from the 90s. The authors also design and build solutions requested by the physicians.