'We have to tend to patients through the window': Prof calls for hospitals to be exempt from load-shedding

Hospitals should be exempted from load-shedding. This is the view of the head of internal medicine at Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital in Johannesburg, Prof Adam Mahomed.

He told TimesLIVE load-shedding is putting a heavy strain on hospital equipment and patient services.

“Most of the hospital equipment uses electricity. In the intensive care unit, we have ventilators and infusion pumps that depend on electricity. When there is load-shedding, there is a slight delay with having the backup kick in.”

He said a challenge with stage 6 load-shedding is that batteries do not get enough chance to recharge. The prolonged outages that come with stage 6 are also not good because backup equipment is usually only able to run for a short time. With wear and tear, Mahomed said the generators become less reliable.

This week, Eskom implemented stage 6 load-shedding for the second consecutive week.

Mahomed said the turnaround time for treating patients was also affected.

Sometimes they see fewer patients than usual and consultations also take longer.

“When moving to backup power, computers take time to reboot and sometimes one needs important information like blood test results and you can’t access them immediately and sometimes we end up rescheduling with the patient. When you have delays like these, it also affects patients because they leave late and still need to go to the pharmacy,” he said. 

The other problem is that generators cannot supply the entire hospital. 

Mahomed told TimesLIVE that on Monday he had to see patients through the window as he needed to use natural light to write on their files and read notes because there were no lights in the ward where he had to do rounds. 

With load-shedding there is also a risk of a power surge that can damage or even destroy equipment. “That is something that we don’t want to see in the public health system because it takes years to get equipment,” he added.

Jack Bloom, the DA's health spokesperson in Gauteng, backed the call for hospitals to be exempted from load-shedding. Hospitals cannot operate optimally even when generators work, as there is only sufficient power for emergency surgery, he said.

Even though the Far East Rand Hospital has been exempted by the local municipality from load-shedding, the hospital generators had to kick in on Saturday after a fault at the local power station, said Bloom. On Sunday, he said, one of the hospital’s two generators ran out of diesel at 9am and new diesel was only available two hours later.

In Kagiso on the West Rand, the Thusong clinic had been without power since Wednesday last week, with no diesel to work the generator, said Bloom. “Nurses do their best to see patients in the dark or outside, but their equipment does not work without electricity.”

While improved management is required to ensure health facilities do not run out of diesel, he said the reality is that batteries and generators were not designed to cope with frequent load-shedding.

“It’s not just Eskom power cuts — Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital has sometimes cancelled surgery because of power loss from cable theft,” said Bloom.

“This is all terribly stressful for hospital staff and patients.

“Hospitals should be exempted from Eskom power cuts wherever possible, and generators should always be in working order to mitigate the effects of unreliable power supply.”

TimesLIVE

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