Hospitals ‘buckling under pressure’ of load-shedding
Hospitals in SA are buckling under the strain of load-shedding, leaving doctors unable to perform emergency surgeries timeously and putting patients’ lives at risk.
This was the warning on Thursday from the Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA), which regulates healthcare in the country, as Eskom struggles to keep the lights on with multiple power station breakdowns.
The HPCSA has made an urgent appeal for all hospitals to be exempt from load-shedding.
“As a result of load-shedding and various stages of power outages, hospitals in the country are buckling under pressure. This has created more strain on the already overstretched healthcare system,” said council president Prof Simon Nemutandani.
“Load-shedding has negatively affected the provision of quality care in all our health facilities and placed an enormous strain on the health practitioners on their daily routine of work.
“Healthcare practitioners in the hospitals are unable to perform emergency surgeries timeously and this has put the lives of the patients at risk. These health facilities are used for undergraduate internships and postgraduate training of health professionals who are also negatively affected.”
Nemutandani said the rolling blackouts, coupled with the lack of a robust contingency plan, have “proved to be catastrophic in the healthcare environment”.
“There are about 420 staterun hospitals and more than 3,000 state-run clinics across the country. While private facilities and secondary and tertiary-level public hospitals appear to be well equipped with generator banks, power supply interruptions place critically ill patients on life-support machines at risk,” he said.
“The performance and lifespan of medical equipment and devices are negatively affected by power interruptions ... smaller healthcare facilities, including primary healthcare clinics not equipped with generator banks, are often left in the dark.”