Management of the Bolgatanga hospital in the Upper East region have said the recent power cuts have posed serious threats to particularly patients in critical conditions and those undergoing surgery, while affecting smooth administrative and other health care services at the facility/.
The hospital management disclosed that the last few weeks have been extremely difficult for health care givers and administrators as they struggle to ensure there is constant supply of electricity, switching between the national electricity grid and their standby generator.
According to the Adminstrator Yakubu Zakaria, the hospital requires 3 drums of diesel per night which amounts to a little over GHS 3000 as he disclosed that the standby generator broke down on Tuesday April 13, 2021 but was quick to add that engineers have been invited to rectify the fault.
Apart from the huge financial burden, the hospital now has to battle with delays in rendering the needed service because it runs a paperless system which is powered by electricity.
Mr. Zakaria said the situation poses a serious threat to the life of persons undergoing surgery and those on oxygen.
“It’s been pretty difficult for us in the last few weeks. Yesterday for instance (Monday April 12), the whole of the hospital was dark. Fortunately, we have a stand-by generator but it is quite expensive maintaining the stand-by generator. A few hours ago, when the lights went off, the generator ceased working. Today (Tuesday April 13) is a theatre day, the surgeons are busy working and the generator just gave up. For a whole night, if we have to keep the generator running then we need about 3 drums of diesel to let the generator run and that’s over GHS3000 just for one night, that’s pretty expensive on the hospital,” he told dreamzfmonline.com.
He further narrated how the situation is causing delays saying “The other aspect of it is the delays it causes our patients. We have rolled on what we call the light wave health information systems. We are now fully paperless and the electronic system we use depends on power so when power trips, when power goes off the computers will shut down automatically and you have to reboot so when a patient is sitting in front of you, that you would have used five minutes to deal with, you will end up using 10-15 minutes because the server will have to be back on. So, if you have a patient on a theatre table, he is opened up and the lights go off, you will be battling with a life and death situation.
Those of the patients who are on oxygen concentrators and the lights go off, the oxygen concentrators is such that once it goes off and it comes on again, it will need about 15-20 minutes to boot and start producing oxygen again. So, the lights situation is pretty serious for us and we pray that they find a solution to it to ensure that the power is stable as we move forwar,” he added.
