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Load shedding affects healthcare services
Load shedding affects healthcare services

In the race to save lives, time is of the essence. And, apart from keeping millions of homes in the dark, this week’s load shedding also had an effect on hospitals.

One of Gauteng’s biggest general hospitals, Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital, suffered 90-second losses of power before the institution’s backup generators kicked in when load shedding struck.

Sources at the hospital spoke of the short but critical effect on healthcare services that such shutdowns could have, and called for essential services such as theirs to be exempt from losses of power.

“We had load shedding on Tuesday night for four and a half hours, as well as on Wednesday afternoon,” said a doctor.

“Fortunately, the hospital has a generator bank with about five generators. In effect, a 90-second loss of power occurs before the generators switch power back on. While most equipment can handle these switches of power relatively well, there is the exception of medical air (compressed clean air), which is used on patients in operating theatres for ventilation purposes. But this becomes compromised during outages.”

The doctor added that while medical air is not essential, it is used for some of the longer elective surgery procedures.

“Emergency procedures are not really affected; they usually go ahead without medical air. But we cannot go ahead with the longer elective surgeries, which means a delay in surgeries and an increase in backlogs.”

When it comes to private healthcare, hospitals in areas such as Sandton would have generators backed up by other generators, which would kick in if the primary bank failed to work.

Said the doctor: “This is not the case in the public health sector. We only have one bank of generators. Charlotte Maxeke hospital is divided into five sections, so there is one generator for each section. They are working, but just because load shedding has not caused us problems yet, does not mean that its impact is not bad.”

DA MPL Jack Bloom said there was a common misconception about hospitals running on generator power. People assume that services continue as normal, he said, but in fact, doctors will operate only in emergency situations. Other procedures that have been planned for in advance have to be postponed.

Sources at the hospital confirmed this setback in surgeries as a result of load shedding.

Another doctor said: “On Tuesday, the power was switched off late at night, so the effect on elective surgeries was negligible. But on Wednesday, various surgeries had to be postponed or cancelled because load shedding started at noon.”

City Press visited Charlotte Maxeke hospital on Thursday. While there was no load shedding scheduled for that day in the suburb of Parktown, where the hospital is situated, several patients spoke of how they had been affected by the outages this week.

“When I was in theatre, there was a blackout, but luckily, it occurred when they had just finished performing my C-section,” said Miriam Mulaya (34). “Yesterday, there was a blackout again. But the staff handled it well because when the electricity went off, the generator kicked in.”

Mulaya was admitted to the hospital on Sunday. She gave birth to a baby girl on Monday and was discharged on Thursday.

The doctor said the biggest problem regarding this week’s power outages was its sudden onset, preventing the hospital staff from having time to put contingency plans in place.

“Eskom only announced this on Sunday, and we had to check online every morning this week to see what stage of load shedding was being implemented that day,” he said.

Gauteng health spokesperson Khutso Rabothata said backup generators were on hand and had kicked in during load shedding at most government hospitals.

“The only hospital that had a challenge on Wednesday was Helen Joseph Hospital. We have four generators there, but one had a mechanical fault. So, we had to activate our diversion programme to move patients from the emergency department to other sections of the hospital. We have not received any information about other adverse effects as a result of that outage.

“The outage happened on Wednesday afternoon, but the theatres were not affected. The generator has since been fixed. At Charlotte Maxeke, we have five new working generators and five older ones on standby. Emergency units are prioritised during a power outage and, so far, we are managing.”

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