Facilitating the clinician’s ‘real life-saving work

Michael Brown, a Biomedical Services Technician based at Christchurch Public Hospital, a 550-bed tertiary acute healthcare facility which is the largest teaching and research hospital in the South Island of New Zealand, discusses his day-to-day job, and the important role such engineering personnel play in enabling clinicians to do ‘the real-life-saving work’. The article is based on a presentation he gave at the IHEA (Institute of Healthcare Engineering Australia) Healthcare Facilities Management Conference 2019 in Sydney last October.

The city of Christchurch is located on a broad plain, geographically positioned between the Pacific Ocean and the Southern Alps of New Zealand. Locals sometimes brag that it is one of the few places in the world where you can go skiing and surfing on the same day. Based on an agricultural economy, it is a city with a growing population, currently at just under 400,000 people.

As many of you may know, Christchurch has been through some significant events in the last few years. Of most relevance to us today was a 6.2 Richter scale earthquake that occurred on 22 February 2011; 185 people died as a result of the earthquake, and the face of the city was changed forever. I must confess that when putting this talk together, I was going to show some slides of Christchurch right after the earthquakes, but while there was no shortage of images to display, looking at them now, even eight years later, is something I struggle to do. One of the photos that I will show is of the National Earthquake Monument, constructed to remember those killed by the earthquake.