Technical reconvertion as alternative for developing countries: Our experience

In Colombia, some international companies or at least their representants, use to sell pieces of equipment without much technical information, in order to make maintenance or not garantee the replacement for a long period of time. In developed 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 personnel of maintenance department have not had the high school degree. Meanwhile, during the period of 1974-1989 the Colombia goverment inverted US $ 231 051 072 in biomedical and clinical equipment, US $9722821 in maintenance and US $ 55 millions in replacements, also, it was planned the trainning of 1300 people for the period of 1990-1995. This training was not met. For all the above reasons we put emphases in our Electronic Engineering students, mainly those of 8th semester (out of 10) to go to the hospitals to learn and to help. During 1991-1995 we have helped hospitals, to save about US $ 5'000.000 in repairing, maintaining, rebuilding, redesigning and/or reconverting analog to digital electronics pieces of biomedical or clinical equipments because most of them are 60s, 70s or 80s technologies, few ones are 90s. We also use to design and build solutions asked by tile physicians.