Maintenance Technology September 2016 - 16

VOICE FROM THE FIELD Art Meets Reliability Science Lawrence Gardner uses his artistic background to craft well-designed reliability and maintenance programs for the Univ. of South Alabama Medical Center. Michelle Segrest, Contributing Editor EACH DAY, LAWRENCE GARDNER looks at a blank canvas and finds new ways to paint a masterpiece. Whether it's sketching a plan that creates more space for beds in a trauma center or designing effective preparedness plans for intense weather events that can attack the Southeastern Gulf Coast, Gardner finds a way to make the brush strokes blend together. Gardner once had aspirations of becoming a civil engineer, but it didn't take long into his first calculus class for him to decide to switch gears. He is artistic and loves to sketch, paint, and create silk-screen designs and ceramic sculptures, so his career pursuit took a dramatic turn. He earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Art Education degrees and became an art teacher. The career suited him, but earning enough money to support his wife and four sons became an impossible task. The solution was to combine his engineering goals with his artistic talent. Now, after 32 years as a reliability and maintenance professional at the Univ. of South Alabama (USA) Medical Center, Mobile, the director of facilities management flexes his artistic muscles in a different way. "Every day I am designing, sketching, and drawing plans for different projects," the 65-yr.-old said of his job with the center. "We do many renovations in an organization like this. We are constantly creating plans to send to a draftsman, who then creates a CAD file for contractors or for our own staff to use. I use my art degree every day." While the career path was different than most reliability and maintenance professionals, it has helped Gardner be diverse and creative in his primary responsibility of daily problem solving for 16 | MAINTENANCE TECHNOLOGY the facilities that make up the 525,000-sq.-ft. campus. "I feel like every step in my career path has been directed at getting me to a level of competencies and skill sets that are perfect for this job that I have today," Gardner said. "Facilities management is not that far a cry from being an artist or an art teacher. It depends on what part of your mind you need to use. When it comes to managing people, I use different types of motivation to push people to the maximum of their competencies. It's important to me that every person on my staff has the opportunity to excel to their greatest potential." Life and death management The USA Medical Center is a Level 1 trauma center for the southwest-Alabama region, in particular the Mobile Bay area and southern Mississippi. The next closest Level 1 trauma center is the Univ. of Alabama-Birmingham, located nearly 300 miles north. The USA facility is also the regional burn-treatment center, including occupational and physical therapy. The medical center was originally built in the 1960s as a county general hospital. The university purchased it from Mobile County around 1975. The goal was for the hospital to integrate its medical school students and have attending physicians who would double as associate professors in the College of Medicine. The campus also includes a facility formerly known as Providence Hospital. It covers another 500,000 sq. ft. of physician offices and clinics. Gardner is responsible for anything that has to do with the SEPTEMBER 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Maintenance Technology September 2016