Why you should establish a daily and weekly maitenance routine.
Ensuring your system continues to run smoothly throughout patient-filled days starts with establishing a daily and weekly maintenance routine. You should get in the habit of performing all checks in the morning before your first patient, that way if something happened overnight you’ll know ahead of time. A normal morning check list should include:
• Laying out Cobalt sheet source for extrinsic daily floods
• Checking the Cobalt energy peak
• Performing a daily flood
• Checking QC numbers
• Verifying that QC numbers are within specification and haven’t varied from the past day’s reading
These numbers should be constant each day, especially the energy peak, which is the quickest way to see if something is amiss with the operation of your camera. If your peak is off from the previous reading, that is when you should call for service. In addition to the daily list above, it is also important to perform intrinsic QC checks at least once a week, as well as COR checks. During a no-show or just a break during your day is a good time to run these. At the end of your day, make sure to fully log out and turn the monitor off. Leaving a monitor on for too many hours shortens the life span of the monitor and may reduce your ability to view with accuracy the images on the display. Lastly, make sure to correctly shut-down your system at least once a week. Following these guidelines will assist you in running a smooth day-to-day patient workload.