COVID-19 disproportionately affects older adults and people who have compromised immune systems, so people living and working in senior living communities have been hit hard by the recent outbreak. With years of experience as a computerized maintenance management system provider, we’ve compiled our best tips to ensure a functioning community as the foundation of better prevention and faster recovery.
Faced with exceptional circumstances, it is essential to make use of all the tools available to minimize negative effects and prepare for future events based on the evidence. Facility management is a central aspect in this fight – and CMMS is every facility manager’s best friend and most powerful asset.
What can CMMS do to make senior living communities safer and better-prepared for pandemics and other emergencies? Preventive maintenance, reporting and task management, and emergency preparedness.
Preventive maintenance
The goal of regular preventive maintenance is to keep all systems in a community up and running. It’s your standing defense that you work on regularly to protect your building.
On an everyday basis, your building needs to be functional and safe for staff, residents and visitors to use and live in. But when an emergency occurs – be it a natural disaster or a pandemic – a well-maintained community allows you to respond quickly and focus on critical intervention measures while medical staff can continue to care for residents.
Reporting and task management
In an emergency situation, CMMS is your fully equipped tool kit to react fast, communicate in real time, and monitor your team’s actions. Be it to check inventory reports or schedule sanitization and housekeeping tasks, CMMS makes operations and teams easy to coordinate. It offers progress tracking and remote task delegation for mobility on the job and real-time updates. With app access to documentation (for instance, instruction manuals), inventory reports, and custom databases, information gets to those who need it when they need it. Maintenance Care also offers customization options that let you set up tasks, reports, databases and more as required.
Emergency preparedness
When you find yourself in an emergency situation, you can’t afford to waste any time. That’s why you want to plan ahead and figure out what you can in advance. Our CMMS has an emergency plan feature that lets you lay out potential actions for high-risk situations before they occur.
For example, you can make action plans for several scenarios (wildfire, storms, disease outbreaks, etc.), set up a line of command and provide instructions for specific team members or job descriptions. Via CMMS online storage, your entire team has access to resources and communication, anywhere and anytime.
An emergency preparedness plan also is very useful for locating possible weaknesses in your existing disaster response, and it gives you the chance to act on it before misfortune strikes. Nobody wants to find out that there are no lifeboats after the iceberg has hit the ship.
To sum it up: A clean, functioning and up-to-date community is your best bet to face any emergency, and CMMS gives you all the tools needed for documentation, task coordination and internal communications.
