Clinical engineering and the quality of health care: The feasibility of low cost interventions

A method was developed to select clinical engineering interventions which can address specific problems of quality of care in a hospital. Emphasis is placed on low cost interventions which can demonstrate the potential of clinical engineering for developing countries. The utilization of mechanical ventilators (MV) was selected as a representative quality of care problem in a 650 bed teaching hospital. The application of the methodology developed led to the selection of an educational intervention which was shown to be effective (p<; 0.001) for reducing the chronic problems observed with the utilization of MV.