Management and maintenance of medical technologies in low resources settings.

Clinical engineering is a branch of biomedical engineering which deals with the whole lifecycle of medical equipment. The adjective “clinical” implies that this professional person is in close proximity to the patient. The clinical engineer is immersed in the healthcare environment, which is without a doubt the most complicated setting imaginable, both in terms of the number of dangers present and in terms of the high-tech equipment used. Careful planning of a hospital’s technical equipment’s whole life cycle can make life easier for operators and have a huge positive impact on patients and the overall process. This is even more true for low resource settings, where the scarcity of resources provides the urge for effective and sustainable methods to design tender specifications, management and maintenance approaches based on evidence, appropriate approaches to dismission, and key enabling technologies, such as semantic ontologies and software for management.