Power outages hit Mpilo . . . 465 lives at risk
MPILO Central Hospital has been hit by power outages, risking the lives of about 465 patients admitted at the hospital, including 81 children in the paediatric ward and 98 patients in the surgical wards.
The 900-bed health institution had been running on generators, disrupting operations since Tuesday, hospital acting chief executive officer and clinical director Xolani Ndlovu in an interview said yesterday.
Ndlovu said they were compelled to shift attention to power supply instead of “concentrating on core business.”
He said backup generators were failing to sustain the operations of the health institution.
“We have had rolling power cuts. What this does is that we face challenges in service provision,” Ndlovu said.
“When we have no electricity, we have no water in the hospital although we might have council water.
“With these prolonged power cuts, whether it is load-shedding or faults, you find we are spending so much money on non-core business.”
Ndlovu said generators were consuming 1000 litres per day, which was not sustainable.
“We are not generating that kind of revenue and even if we are generating, we still have clinical service to do and provision of medicine.”
Mpilo Central Hospital is the second largest health centre in the country after Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals in Harare.
Ndlovu said unreliable power supply had hamstrung operations in the theatre and intensive care unit among other critical areas at the hospital.
In the past, the hospital was connected to two substations which would complement each other in case one developed a fault.