A study of civil engineering maintenance in government hospital buildings

Abstract

Maintenance is an actions required for retaining or restoring a piece of equipment, machineries, services or system to the specified operable condition to maximize its useful life. Building defects are defined as materials, components or finishes which did not meet its expected performance criteria. When a building fails to perform as it should, the contractor immediately look for causes and answers to solve the problems. To achieve the aim of this study, four (4) objectives have been set which are to determine the type of defects occurred in the selected hospitals, to investigate the process of daily maintenance activities, to evaluate the hospital building performance with respect to their services and maintenances and to identify problems during maintenance activities, thus propose the effective strategies to overcome them. In order to obtain the data, a set of questionnaires are used and the survey was done at the selected hospitals within Northern Peninsular Malaysia. Data obtained from the survey is analyzed using Statistical Package of Social Science (SPSS) software. Result of the study showed the responds from the maintenance workers about the overall defects at the hospitals. Most of the respondents agree that cracking is the most occurring defect in the hospital buildings that have been surveyed and they also agree that improper installation during construction caused the building structure to crack. Based on the answers given, the respondents also stated that insufficient cost causing problems during maintenance work.