e-News from Eclipse-fm^®

Eclipse-fm^® Version 5.1

• increase the productivity of the Estates and Facilities function
• save costs by combining the management of Estates/Facilities, Medical Engineering, and Assets into a single system whilst also linking automatically to the UK standard cleaning monitoring package, C4C (Credits for Cleaning)
• minimise the potential impact of costly H & S prosecutions
• reduce your Trusts’ carbon footprint

 

Health Care Facilities Scotland Conference

4/5 November 2010

This will be our fourth year supporting the HFC Scotland Conference, which this year celebrates its 10th year of existence. We expect to have the Eclipse-fm^® v5.2 EBME material on demonstration at this show.

 

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Healthcare Facilities Consortium Conference

7/8 March 2011

As always, we will be at the HFC Conference, this year at Old Trafford, Manchester, with the latest version of Eclipse-fm^® on show.

 

 

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• Allocate a task to PDA
• Print report
• Preview Report
• Export to file (CSV - Comma Separated Values)

 

Allocate task to PDA is obvious
Preview, Print, and Export (to CSV file) are all new features.

Preview and Print relate to the new ability to Preview and Print the report just as displayed on screen in the layout as determined by the user. Layout includes, data ordering, grouping, what columns to include, what column to "freeze" on, etc.

Layout Control
Hidden away in the column heading space, and in the new floating menus (when you first use task Enquiry, try right click in the Column headers area as well as in the body of the list) are a whole new set of options for formatting the report to what you want.

When you first open task Enquiry, in the space above the column headings is the invitation to "Drag a column header here to group by that column"

Actually, that’s a bit unambitious. Try this

 

The tasks are now grouped accordingly - and very quickly.

Click on the column headers, and drag one down. It’s gone. Try another - now you are beginning to reduce the width of the table, and any printed version, to something manageable. Maybe, with all the colour and layout retained, it will do as a quick print out even?

You can also move columns around, moving, say Location and Department across to columns 2 and 3.

Freeze Column - if you look in the floating menus again, you will see you have an option to freeze a column - this works as in a spreadsheet, so having moved Location and Department as above, you can freeze the first three columns, and scroll the remainder of the columns against them horizontally.

The Field chooser option allows you to put fields you have removed back into the list.

Preview/Print

Now try Preview report. A very close representation to what you now have on the screen. Print that out, and it will print with that layout, colours, etc.
 

 

What you set is what you get
Perhaps best of all, whatever layout you end up with is remembered. So when you fire up Eclipse-fm^® again tomorrow, Task Enquiry appear with exactly the same layout as when you went home!

And maybe second best of all - if you really mess it up, click on the Default Layout option and it will be back the way the programmer intended it!

We think that these new facilities will reinforce the position of task Enquiry as "Eclipse-fm^® Control Centre", the most used element and the one that you will spend most time in. When you get the new version, spend a little time exploring these new features, and getting to your preferred layout. It is going to make your job easier. Compare with the previous task Enquiry:-

 

No competition!

Many other list views are being overhauled to provide some of this functionality, so it will be worth seeing what options you have in the header area, or from a right mouse click when in any list view, especially if it looks a bit different in this new version.

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Awareness of the potential for "unpleasant" consequences of poor maintenance management both for Trusts and individual senior managers is apparently beginning to grow. The September edition of the Health Estate Journal has a multi-page article looking at risk management and the potential impact on Trusts if incidents reveal that evidence of following proper maintenance procedures is not available. Note well that this does not mean that maintenance has to have actually been lacking, just that in the event of trouble, you could be guilty until proved innocent by reference to realistic and coherent maintenance records!

Here is an extract relating to gas installations

"It is important to very carefully consider the competence and expertise of gas installers prior to employing them, as well as ensuring the existence of a proper paper trail in terms of documentation such as certificates so that, if necessary, an estates manager can prove to a court that adequate inspection and maintenance has actually been carried out. It is also necessary to regularly test the performance of carbon monoxide alarms and venting flues, since, while problems here might often be attributable to the "acts and omissions" of installers, the employing organisation needed to be in a position to be able to prove it had complied with its health and safety duties under law."

"You may not even know something has gone wrong with one of your lifts, but you had better have a full paper trail in place showing regular inspection and maintenance as you could, recent case history suggests, still be fined even if no actual injury occurs".

"spends a lot of time defending NHS Trusts in cases where health and safety procedures either had not been properly followed, or where (risk assessment) policies and procedures had been so poorly set out that the courts felt that they had so little alternative but to heavily fine defendants whose actions, corporately, it had been determined, had caused death or serious injury"

• The opportunity to define maintenance tasks in detail, including easy identification of any supporting documentation that may be appropriate.
• Control of qualified personnel. Eclipse-fm^® does not absolutely stop you from using a non qualified gas fitter, but it does document why that was not the case if that had to happen.
  • This can extend to cover contractor staff, and Web-Eclipse makes it an easy and low cost exercise to provide for this.
• A feedback mechanism that provides long term proof that maintenance was done, done at the time it was scheduled to be done, was specified correctly, and done by a specific individual.
• A critical notice system that ensures that you can respond to critical equipment notices with the minimum of bureaucratic effort and the maximum effectiveness.
• A permanent, automatically generated, fully auditable maintenance "paper trail" for each asset

• About moving to Eclipse-fm^®
• About using Eclipse-fm^® to get the best out of it.

"Yes, the staff found it different, but our staff members have been very open to the changes involved, and Eclipse-fm® turned out to be easy enough to learn from scratch with very little outside assistance".

"I really like the way the Eclipse-fm® screens work. Eclipse-fm® gives me much more control in allocating tasks to the best person taking into account workload, experience and in some cases, qualifications. Also it is much easier to trace jobs when necessary and I particularly like the extensive searching features that Eclipse-fm® provides; these let me find any task detail even from only a vague memory of what it was."

• Are you still running Windows XP?
• And if so, is that Service Pack 2 (SP2)?