Patient crisis as hospital generators fail

Resident engineer fired on the spot, says MEC

AT LEAST five patients had to be moved from Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital when the facility’s generators failed after a power cut caused by a fire at a nearby substation.

The hospital was plunged into darkness around 10am yesterday when the generators started up but then stopped again, forcing doctors to cancel scheduled operations.

Gauteng Health MEC Qedani Mahlangu, who visited the hospital in the afternoon, said the generators did kick in when the power went off, but failed a few minutes later after a problem with one of them caused the rest to also shut down.

As a result, the hospital’s in-house engineer was fired with immediate effect, said the department’s spokesman Steve Mabona.

Said Mahlangu: “We have moved babies and the neonatal infants. Four of them have been moved to Sandton Medi-Clinic, together with staff. Three maternity cases have been moved to Rahima Moosa Hospital, one to Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital and one critical patient who needed ventilation was moved to Far East Rand Hospital,” she told The Star.

The MEC indicated that new patients who were being brought to the hospital by ambulance were being diverted to neighbouring hospitals which weren’t affected by the power failure.

Power was restored to some blocks after technicians were called to work on the generators.

The technicians said low air pressure in one of the generators meant that the cooling systems had failed, causing each generator to automatically shut down.

When The Star team walked through the hospital about four hours after the power outage started, many sections were still in darkness.

Signs stuck on the lifts warned staff and patients to use the stairs instead.

The normally packed casualty section was deserted except for a few patients.

One man, Hennie de Necker, said he had taken his 71-year-old mother to the hospital for a CAT scan when the power went out.

Three-and-a-half hours later, they decided to reschedule their appointment and leave.

“When we left at about 1.30pm it was still pitch dark. The only light was the natural light coming was where the sun was shining in. In the CT room we had to switch on our cellphone lights,” he said.

De Necker spoke to a patient who had to have her surgery postponed due to the power outage.

“There was this lady, highly ticked off. She was booked for an op, she was lying on the theatre bed and they took her off the bed. There was already another lady on the bed who’d had an anaesthetic. Their ventilators and anaesthetic machines work with electricity, so they had to manually intubate the patient.”

Meanwhile, DA MPL Jack Bloom alleged that doctors had to complete surgery using lights from their cellphones.

But Mahlangu said she was not aware of this.

“I’ve been in this hospital for a while now. I’ve been talking to the doctors, I’ve been talking to the nurses. I know of a case of a patient who was taken to theatre and they were about to start the operation, but had to take the patient back to ICU,” she said.

The MEC said she was working with hospital officials to implement an action plan until the power was fully restored to the facility.

“We’ve ensured that we’ve got sufficient diesel, which is being monitored… to make sure that patients are not compromised, and we are monitoring the situation as we speak. We are going to have a meeting now to assess everything, and on the basis of that, put a plan in place on how we’re going to manage the situation in the next 48 hours,” she said.

Meanwhile, City Power spokeswoman Yumna Sheik said the outage which affected the Parktown area was caused by a fire at the Ridge substation.

By 5pm yesterday, 50 percent of the power had been restored, with the rest expected to be restored by this morning.

“We have teams that are working 24 hours,” she said.

The cause of the fire was being investigated.