From Consulting to Project Management at a Massachusetts Healthcare Center

A Massachusetts healthcare center, in an effort to become proactive about the maintenance of facility equipment and to avoid run-to-fail operations, hired Triumvirate to perform an assessment of its campus.

After a close review and walkthrough of each building and each room, Triumvirate proposed a number of actions as part of a written assessment.

Recommendations were organized into three categories: immediate service, additional inspection and/or maintenance recommended but not urgent, and no problems found. A major proposal was to clean the secondary containment within a main accumulation area (MAA) of the hospital. The debris and dirt underneath the floor grates in the MAA put the client at risk for citation during regulatory inspection.

The hospital signed a working agreement with Triumvirate to perform the work, and our FacilityCare team arrived on-site the next day, equipped with all necessary resources.

Triumvirate’s team took the following measures:

• Removed all chemical bottles and drums from the MAA, holding these objects in another temporary MAA in order to complete cleaning.
• Removed floor grates so that they could access the floor below, which contained dirt, vermiculite, small chemicals that had fallen through the grates, batteries, pens, markers, and other debris. The MAA floor had not been cleaned for years, so there was substantial build-up.
• Triumvirate’s specialists collected everything with a vacuum and ran analytics to determine appropriate waste codes for shipment off-site.
• Test results showed that the material was not hazardous, so the collected material was shipped off-site with the non-RCRA-regulated state waste code MA-99.
• The team also decontaminated the floors and walls of the MAA with industrial cleaner; the rags for this process were disposed of off-site as well.

Triumvirate served as a compliance adviser for the client, alerting the hospital that its MAA and other equipment required immediate action to stay within compliance. Not only was Triumvirate able to save the institution thousands of potential regulatory fines, but was able to keep the institution in good standing with the joint commission and streamline their preventative maintenance process for safety, compliance and cost.