The Potential rol3e of IFMBE in improving the state of medical equipment in developing countries

Abstract

In developing countries medical equipment is often non-functional. Well known reasons for that are donations of already broken equipment and lack of spare parts and consumables. It is to be expected that current state of the art medical equipment is even less suitable for donation, given the way they are designed to function under conditions that are hard to find in rural areas in low resource countries. The key to start solving these problems lies in improving technical education at all levels in these countries.

This paper explores how the IFMBE can work together with several other institutions (WHO, local professional organizations, non-profit organizations, Ministries of Health and Education,...) to train and sustain a competent technical workforce that can do maintenance, repair, and design of biomedical equipment using locally available materials and knowledge.