Supporting public sector training

Posted on 20 February 2017

Mediclinic’s Technical Operations team have invited their peers in provincial government to join their training programme. This will develop skills in the healthcare sector and build public-private relationships.

The job title ‘Medical Technician’ has become a permanent fixture on the Department of Higher Education & Training’s annual list of occupations in high demand. To overcome skills shortages and develop technical staff, Mediclinic has established a training course, or Performance Inspection Procedure (PIP) to enable hospital staff to perform checks on non-life-support medical equipment.

‘It’s a standard course that we run in all our regions, facilitated by a Mediclinic in-house training mentor,’ says Petrus Swanepoel, Technical Operations Manager for Mediclinic’s Central Region. The PIP training covers the basic theory of operation for specific medical devices, as per the products’ instructions and manuals. The training focuses on the parameters in which these devices operate and evaluating whether they’re working within the specifications.

Basic and advanced training
PIP is divided into Basic and Advanced courses. ‘The Basic course is three days, while the Advanced course takes a full week,’ says Swanepoel. ‘We balance theoretical and practical training with a competence test at the end. On the Advanced course the first day or two is spent doing theory before moving to a hands-on phase where we engineer faults for the trainees to find and recalibrate. These courses are open to Mediclinic’s clinical technicians and any technical person who demonstrates the skills for working on their clinical or medical equipment. The training allows Mediclinic to do some of the equipment maintenance work such as calibration, checking or basic fault-finding themselves. Upskilling Mediclinic’s team of technicians helps them manage costs by keeping their work in-house.’

Finding common ground
Thabang Tau at the Free State’s provincial Department of Health has similar goals to Swanepoel at Mediclinic. Tau is responsible for taking care of the provincial government’s clinical equipment. Skills development and cost-containment are two of his biggest challenges, so Mediclinic Bloemfontein offered to support Tau’s team with budget management training and invited them to Mediclinic’s technical training.

‘Public service technicians don’t have access to training which means they end up having to outsource everything,’ Swanepoel says. In February, Swanepoel and his team invited a group of those public service technicians to join Mediclinic Central Region’s training course. ‘We had a total of 16 people attending the training, nine were from Mediclinic hospitals and the remaining seven came from the Department of Health.’

Public-private partnerships
For Swanepoel and for Tau, February’s training course provided a perfect opportunity to develop the growing relationship between the private and public sectors in general, and between Mediclinic and the Free State Department of Health in particular. ‘We really want to nurture that relationship. We’ve encouraged the public service trainees to stay in contact and would like to provide them with ongoing support,’ Swanepoel says. ‘This is the first time we’ve done something like this together, and we both see it as just the beginning.’

An electrical course is scheduled for later in the year, and Swanepoel hopes to involve the Department of Health once again.