A review of sustainable maintenance management of public healthcare facilities in developing countries: the case of Ghana

Abstract

The maintenance management of healthcare facilities is a multifaceted field of facilities management due mainly to the complexity of the building designs and service systems and shortage of maintenance budget. Most public hospitals in Ghana are faced with the challenges of inadequate maintenance budget, bad management, staff supervision challenges, inadequate technical know-how in equipment usage and poor maintenance culture. Thus it is essential to research on how maintenance management service quality of public hospitals in Ghana impact on user satisfaction. This paper seeks to review detailed service quality and customer satisfaction concepts. Secondly, the study outlines and discusses the different concepts of buildability, sustainability, and maintainability in the lifecycle of a healthcare facility. Up to date literature review was based on articles from 2000 to 2015. The paper brings together research on service quality assessment and customer satisfaction assessment applied within healthcare maintenance management. Particularly, the healthcare industry can improve the service quality and ultimately customer/user satisfaction through the concept/indicators of buildability, sustainability and maintainability. With the application of SERVQUAL and good management procedure such as the PLAN-DO-CHECK-ACT model, authors propose a concept to optimise these, from the building design stage through the construction to the operation and maintenance of healthcare facilities. This paper can be used by stakeholders of public healthcare facilities: government, hospital management, and users as an important reference on sustainable maintenance management to achieve better service quality and in so doing increase customer/user satisfaction.