Quality Assessment of Emergency Corrective Maintenance of Critical Care Ventilators Within the Context of COVID-19 in São Paulo, Brazil

This paper presents the process of quality assessment of emergency corrective maintenance of critical care ventilators in a node, IPT-POLI, of a voluntary network, the initiative + Maintenance of Ventilators, led by SENAI-CIMATEC to perform maintenance on unused mechanical ventilators during the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. A procedure was developed for quality assessment of equipment subjected to corrective emergency maintenance, covering the main points of three main standards for performance and safety assessment. A set of seven critical care ventilators was evaluated according to the following parameters: leakage current, resistance of protective earth, accuracy of control and instruments, delivered oxygen test, and alarms. All evaluated ventilators were out of use for more than 2 years and underwent corrective emergency maintenance before having their performance and safety assessment. In electrical safety tests, all equipment presented values prescribed for the standard. In the assessment of ventilator parameters, all equipment did not perform sufficiently according to the standard. It was possible to conclude that the choice of criteria to perform the quality assessment in critical care ventilators proved to be important and can be a report of great value for future pandemic scenarios such as that experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.