A German Delegation Composed of Facility Management Experts Meet with TUMS Chancellor
Date: 4/30/2011
TUMSPR News: A delegation from different universities of Germany met with TUMS Chancellor, Dr. Bagher Larijani, for talks on facility management in hospitals on April 25, 2011.
A delegation from different universities of Germany met with the Chancellor for Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS), Dr. Bagher Larijani, for talks on facility management in hospitals on April 25, 2011.
At the beginning Dr. Mandana Banedj-Schafii, a scientific assistant at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, thanked the chancellor for the time he had allocated for the meeting and then Dr. Larijani and Ghazi-khansari, the director for TUMS International Relations Office, welcomed the guests.
In his introductory talks, Dr. Larijani briefly introduced the university and said the University allocated 45% of the scientific output of the Iranian publications in medical sciences at MedLine among 42 other medical universities in the country, depicting the large sum of research going on in the University.
Professor Karl Bencke, the rector of Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany established about 150 years ago and offering architecture, civil engineering and art degrees, thanked the chancellor for the meeting and said facility management (FM) in hospitals tries to help handle complex systems in a much more concise way where other limited fragmentation of knowledge in modern hospitals and many interconnected disciplines are independently and separately are operating. He said this way we could look at these processes in a more integrated way, handling a lot of knowledge with modern engineering system and that being the reason for his presence in the project and bringing him to the university to help in that respect. He said “I am glad to be here and I was impressed by your presentation which shows a lot of history and tradition you have achieved”.
Dr. Kunibet Lennerts, a facility management professor at the Civil Engineering Faculty, introduced his institute as one of the oldest technical universities founded in 1825 which is amongst the three top universities in Germany. He said utilization, management and recognition of the life cycle of building were his expertise and his team was doing research in the area of hospitals and managing facilities and taking care of secondary processes and optimizing the involved processes since the year 2000. He explained that facility management included a variety of activities from cleaning to maintenance of the buildings, the maintenance of the infrastructure and the biomedical equipment such as CTs, MRIs, etc and all the services one needs to keep a hospital up and running. He said they were here to offer their help regarding the secondary processes needed in hospital managements.
Professor Lennerts said his department was helping about 30 hospitals not only in Germany but also in Austria, Switzerland, etc by benchmarking through collection of information and optimization of services and then comparing the performance of different hospitals and looking a better practice. He said his institute offered different PhD courses for lay out optimization so that the clinical pathway of the patient is optimized. Then he said hospitals normally look alike around the world as they have not been optimized for patients but the ones which have been done so make the difference. Then he referred to Dr. Manadana Schafii’s PhD degree in which she has hypothesized how to transfer facility management to developing countries and said he was ready to help in this regard in Iran and exemplified the conference they had held by the help of the World Bank finance in 2004 and 2005 training 250-260 specialists from Iran. He then expressed his satisfaction with the progress the agreement for holding a master’s program in facility management was making at the University of Tehran which is collaborating with Tehran University of Medical Sciences and hoped PhD programs and creation of a competence center would ensue. He said this way hospitals can reduce their cost and help people.
Later in the session, Dr. Horst Gudat, an independent hospital facility management consultant from Hannover, and the president of Dr. Gudat Consult gave a short educational background of himself and talked about his experience in hospital planning and erction in another company in the past years and his responsibilities in a big university for this project not only in Europe but also in Moscow and Japan and other countries. Mr Gudat has been at the job and worked independently for the last decade in facility services and facility procedures in hospitals. He said he has had the same project in some German hospitals with the goal to optimize the procedures and the processes in secondary functions. He is the vice-president of Hospital Engineering Society in Germany. This society is 30 years old. This society has held yearly conferences in the medical university in Hannover for the past 25 years where many recommendations have been given on hospital technique and in the past ten years more on hospital facility management and optimization of secondary companies. Being a member of the international association, he has been involved in facility management transfer and has given day-long lectures in Germany and the US.
Dr. Gudat finally hoped to be able to bring many practical ideas in these projects as he has effectively been involved with organizing and optimizing such projects in new organizations and how to do them right and convince people who lead hospitals what facility management is and what its advantages are in cost reduction and optimization of procedures and processes.
Professor Hans-Gunther Sonntag, from the oldest university in Germany which was founded in 1386 (A.D.), is a medical doctor and has specialized in infectious diseases and hospital hygiene. He has also been engaged in quality management. He has been the former director of the Institute of Hygiene and Medical Microbiology of Germany from 1980 to 2004 and also been the dean of the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg. He said “Certainly you have heard about Heidelberg Medical [Faculty] and what it has done but I am really impressed about what you are doing here, especially in research which is very impressive”.
Professor Sonntag hoped for closer contact between the two institutes in the future and also with the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg and said there were a lot of possibilities, for example the number of bone marrow transplantations that TUMS has done [3000], or other transplants and many other things that the two could have contact and exchange.
Regarding his past experience in hygiene, professor Sonntag said he had been involved doing facility management, especially working at the faculty for 25 years from which 16 years he had been as the dean, and realized its importance. He emphasized that holding short courses on the subject would help and work as a bridge between technical and medical experts as there existed differences in understanding about facility management in the medical field between the two parties. He hoped his position would support the project as it was a good one and it would be nice to see the results in the near future and show that with facility management in the medical field we not only can save money but also have good maintenance as the main focus should be on helping the patients.
Introducing himself, Dr. Fard Abolhassani, the vice-chancellor for the health of the University, said his he had had devoted himself to the public health since 1992 and presently is responsible for the health of the people living in the southern parts of Tehran and its suburban areas there. He also mentioned his responsibility as the vice-chancellor for both health and treatment from 2005 up to the beginning of 2011 when he had been involved with hospital facility management as part of his job but since the separation of the two domains in early 2011 he is not engaged in FM anymore. He justified his presence at the meeting his past experience in the field, being one of the supervisors of Dr. Mandana Schafii’s thesis on hospital facility management and for the sake of the meeting itself.
Dr. Abolhassani believed the science could be applicable in the public health sector but regarding the complex nature of hospital facility management the application of the science in that environment was more justifiable. Dr. Abolhassani called for more efforts both at hospital and policy making levels for attracting the attention of the heads of hospitals in the public sector as they were not concerned enough with cost reduction as their counterparts in the private sector.
He finally wished the delegation could succeed in their goal in holding a master’s degree in the field of FM and believed holding short courses would promote capacity building and attract the attention of the authorities to the subject.
Dr. Mandana-Banedj Schafii once again thanked the chancellor for the meeting and mentioned the focus of her doctorate thesis which had been comparing the life of for example a CT scanning device in Germany and in Iran and the transfer of FM knowledge from Germany to developing countries and promised to actively follow the meetings to a tangible result.
Hoping the meetings end in scientific ties between the aforesaid institutions with Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Dr. Ghazi-khansari suggested the group visit a couple of the hospitals affiliated to the university.
Chancellor Larijani asked the delegation to write a proposal after they have visited the hospitals to be reviewed and considered by him and other authorities of the University for prospective collaborations.
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