Surgeries resume at RUH; air flow system remains at risk
Some parts of Royal University Hospital remain vulnerable as life at the facility gets back to normal following a disruptive power outage.
The hospital’s air flow system has no backup power in the event of another outage, said Nilesh Kavia, vice-president of finance and corporate services for the health region.
“The situation today is a little brighter than it was yesterday,” Kavia said on Wednesday, a day and a half after power problems gripped the aging hospital.
As of Wednesday, crews had restored interim power, steam, suction, critical ventilation and heating, as well as the parkade elevator.
However, some key systems have no backup power source. The hospital has a backup generator, but the only panel that distributes that power is the one that broke. It feeds power to critical systems such as air circulation and fire pumps.
The health region has contingency plans for some of those systems, such as medical gas tanks and portable suction systems.
The hospital is working on a short-term solution for the air flow system, and in the medium term will replace the panel that failed, but Kavia said he didn’t know when that will happen.
The health region hasn’t yet tallied up the cost of repairs.
Thirty-seven postponed surgeries from Tuesday and Wednesday are expected to be rescheduled over the course of the next week or so, said Jackie Mann, vicepresident of health services.
Operating rooms were up and running again Wednesday for emergency surgeries, and surgeries already scheduled for today are expected to go ahead as planned.
Grant Miller, the pediatric surgeon at RUH, said the cancelled surgeries have been hard on three of his young patients who were waiting in the hospital for urgent, but not emergency, surgery.
“For this one boy and his family, it’s been particularly difficult having to wait,” Miller said.
“This one patient in particular, he’s ill, he needs a diagnosis — and surgery is part of that — and then treatment to follow. And so everything is on hold now until we get him into the op- erating room.”
Staff dealt with the hiccups quite well, but they’d like to be able to take more pride in the hospital, he said.
Cleanliness and maintenance at RUH have been neglected over the years, and “now we’re starting to see the results,” Miller said.
“I still feel the hospital should set the standard, but at least if (it doesn’t) set the standard, it should be at least as clean as I would keep my home. If sink taps are broken in my house, I get them fixed. But here, we just kind of leave them.”
Miller said he doesn’t know for certain if the maintenance and the cleanliness standards of the facility put patients more at risk of infections, but he worries about it.