Resources
Checklists and templates
You came here hoping for a checklist to download. We are not going to give you one, and the reason is the most useful thing on this page: a checklist written for equipment we have never seen, in a hospital we do not know, against standards we have not read, would be a liability wearing the costume of a shortcut.
- Biomedical engineering
- Quality and compliance
- Field technicians
What is a maintenance template?
Definition
Maintenance template
A maintenance template is the written procedure for a class of equipment: the steps to perform, the checks to make, the readings to capture and what to do with a result, versioned so that work done against it stays interpretable after the procedure changes.
A template is not a list of tasks. The difference is that a task list tells somebody what to touch, and a template tells them what to establish. "Check the alarm" is a task. "Trigger the alarm, record whether it sounded, and record what you did if it did not" is a procedure, and only one of those produces a record that means something a year later.
The word doing most of the work is versioned. Templates improve, because people learn things. What must never happen is that improving a template silently rewrites the past, so that last year's completed work appears to follow a procedure that did not exist when it was done.
Why we will not give you a downloadable checklist
Because the content of your checklist is a clinical and engineering decision about your equipment, and a vendor supplying one is making a medical claim about a device it has never seen.
The demand is completely reasonable and the supply is the problem. What to check on an infusion pump, what a passing result looks like and how often it happens depend on the manufacturer, the model, its duty cycle, the standards that apply where you are and your organisation's own risk appetite. We know none of those things. Any checklist we published would be a guess, and the danger is not that it would be obviously wrong. It is that it would be plausible, and plausible is what gets adopted without review.
There is a worse second-order effect. A downloaded checklist arrives with implied authority: somebody published it, so somebody must have thought about it. That authority is exactly what stops a busy department asking whether it fits their equipment. A blank template asks that question by existing.
This is the same rule that runs through the whole product. Rydya ships no intervals, no limits and no thresholds, and it never will. The platform holds what your qualified staff decide and refuses to bend it. A checklist library would be that principle abandoned at the exact moment it mattered, which is when somebody wanted a shortcut.
How to build a template worth following
Start from the manufacturer, write for the technician, capture values rather than ticks, and make refusal possible.
- 1
Start from the manufacturer guidance, not from a competitor's list
The manual is the primary source for what the device needs. Where guidance is ambiguous or absent, that is a decision for your qualified staff to make and record as a decision, with a name against it, rather than a default somebody inherited.
- 2
Write each step so it can be failed
If a step cannot produce a bad outcome, it is decoration. "Inspect the casing" cannot be failed by anyone in a hurry. "Record any damage to the casing, and photograph it" can. The test of a step is whether an honest technician could report a problem by following it.
- 3
Capture the value, not the tick
A record showing that a reading was taken and what it was is worth something years later. A record showing that somebody ticked a box is worth nothing, because it survives every level of care from diligent to absent, identically.
- 4
Say what to do when a check fails
This is the step most templates omit, and it is where the template earns its existence. A technician who finds a problem and does not know the next action will do the most reasonable available thing, which is frequently to note it and move on.
- 5
Cut it until a technician will actually do it
Every field nobody downstream reads is a withdrawal from the account of goodwill you need for the fields that matter. A twelve-point template that gets done beats a forty-point template that gets pencil-whipped at the end of the week, and the second is worse than nothing because it looks like data.
- 6
Version it, and keep the version with the result
So that improving the procedure is a normal act rather than a dangerous one, and so that what was done in 2024 remains readable in 2027 as what was actually done.
How to tell a bad checklist from a good one
Four tells, all of which are visible before anyone uses it.
Every item is a tick
No values, no readings, no free text. It cannot distinguish a thorough job from a fast one, which means over time it will not, because the fast one is cheaper and nothing punishes it.
It has no failure branch
Nothing tells the technician what happens if a check fails. The template is a record of intent rather than an instrument of safety, and the first real failure will be handled by improvisation.
It is the same for every device class
A generic checklist applied to an infusion pump and a ventilator is a checklist that describes neither. Genericness is usually a sign it was inherited rather than written.
Nobody can say who decided it
The most important question about any interval or limit in your templates is who decided it and on what basis. If the answer is that it came with the system, or that it has always been there, you are carrying a clinical decision made by nobody.
When to write templates, and who should own them
Late enough that you know what your equipment actually does, and owned by the qualified people who will be accountable for the result.
Writing templates first is a common and expensive sequencing choice. A department that spends its first two months authoring procedures for equipment it has not yet inventoried will write them for the estate it believes it has. Import the register, get codes on the equipment that matters, and let a month of real work tell you what you own before you write down how to look after it.
Ownership must sit with the people qualified to make the calls, which in most organisations is biomedical engineering with quality, and in a laboratory is usually quality first. It cannot sit with whoever is good at documents. This sounds obvious and is violated constantly, because writing procedures looks like an administrative task and is not.
The realistic starting scope is small and unglamorous: the handful of device classes where an unnoticed failure is genuinely expensive or genuinely unsafe. A short, real, followed set of templates is worth more than complete coverage that nobody trusts, and it can be widened once the rhythm exists.
What Rydya does with the templates you write
It holds them, versions them, applies them to the devices you choose on the recurrence you set, generates the work ahead of the due date, carries the procedure to the technician, records the readings against your limits, and keeps the version with the result. It supplies none of the content, and it will not compare your template to anybody else's or suggest what it should contain. That refusal is the same one that makes the rest of the record defensible.
Questions
Why will you not publish a preventive maintenance checklist we can download?
Because its content depends on the manufacturer, the model, the duty cycle, the standards that apply where you are and your own risk appetite, and we know none of those. A published checklist would not be obviously wrong; it would be plausible, and plausible is what gets adopted without review. It would also arrive with implied authority, which is exactly what stops a busy department asking whether it fits their equipment.
What makes a checklist item good?
That it can be failed, and that it captures a value rather than a tick. "Inspect the casing" cannot be failed by anyone in a hurry. "Record any damage and photograph it" can. A record showing what a reading actually was is worth something in three years; a record showing somebody ticked a box survives every level of care from diligent to absent, identically.
What do most templates leave out?
What to do when a check fails. It is the step that earns the template its existence, and it is routinely missing. A technician who finds a problem and does not know the next action will do the most reasonable thing available to them, which is often to note it and move on, and the note will be found later by nobody.
Should we write our templates before or after importing our equipment?
After. A department that authors procedures before inventorying its estate writes them for the equipment it believes it has. Import the register, label what matters, and let a month of real work tell you what you actually own. Then write templates for the handful of device classes where an unnoticed failure is genuinely expensive or unsafe, and widen from there.
See it on your equipment
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