Fallout continues in the wake of articles in The Washington Post in February on the deplorable conditions in some buildings at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.Patients and their families still must deal with poorly maintained facilities, though repairs are under way. Several hospital officials have resigned. And lawmakers remain critical of the military's decisions regarding veteran health care in general, including building maintenance.In my editorial in the March 2007 issue of Maintenance Solutions, I wrote that deferred maintenance usually is "the manifestation of a much larger issue."Today, a reader e-mailed me his take on what that much larger issue is:
Top "facility managers see a double benefit from deferred maintenance," he writes. Replacement materials can be cost prohibitive. Larger facilities have the savvy staff who creatively replace malfunctioning equipment with brand new, grant-funded 'demonstration projects,'" while "smaller facilities 'wing it' by deferring parts purchases and by [avoiding] the equally costly labor. Nixing both the parts and labor costs yields the double $$$ benefit to facility managers."So my question remains: Will the crisis at Walter Reed provide any momentum toward changing this short-sighted attitude toward building maintenance that is so prevalent among many organizations' top executives and so destructive?