Patients’ lives depend on a variety of electrically-powered equipment. These may include ventilators, incubators, suction units, and dialysis machines. When a power outage occurs at a hospital or care home, many lives are at risk.
Hospitals and any medical facility should always be ready with a disaster recovery plan to avoid outages and possibly devastating results. Specifically, this plan should include fuel which can ensure emergency generators and emergency vehicles continue working. Here are Speciality Fuel Services, we offer our fuel supply services specifically to hospitals, to ensure fuel is supplied and patients’ care is maintained.
Possible Consequences to Hospital Outages
There are a wide variety of possible consequences to hospital outages. From non-emergency surgeries needing to be postponed, to vital machines being shut down, a lack of power in a hospital can have wide-reaching effects. When an outage occurs within a hospital, basic functions such as powered wheelchairs, fire alarms, air conditioning, water and food prep and more all will cease to function, affecting patient’s care and lives.
Here are some specific examples to the consequences of hospital power outages:
Machines Stop Working
A loss of power will cause vital machines to stop working, thus threatening people’s lives. In 1999, a blackout led to the loss of a man’s life in Rhode Island Hospital. His ventilator failed when the hospital’s backup system didn’t work.
It’s not just ventilators that require electricity, but devices like medical fridges to store medication and vaccines, monitoring equipment for labor and delivery floors, blood pressure machines, and many more. Electricity helps a hospital function efficiently and helps save lives.
Surgeries
During a delicate surgery, a sudden blackout will cause severe complications. Essential tools that monitor a patient’s health stop working and the lack of power could lead to dangerous consequences, thus putting a patient’s life at risk.
Reputation
Patients consider hospitals a “safe” zone, where they’re cared for until they’ve recovered. A hospital that is unable to handle an outage may lose its reputation and ultimately its business. Lawsuits may ensue, and patients will consider other reputable care options instead.
How to Prepare for a Hospital Outage
With the previously-mentioned consequences in mind, you must be prepared with a business continuity plan during an outage. A business continuity plan will ensure that the hospital remains functioning and active, despite an outage.
The following may be a crucial part of your business continuity plan:
Conduct a System’s Analysis
The hospital’s standby power systems should be analyzed to ensure they run efficiently when needed. The analysis should determine what systems are supplied by which back-up power system. Not every area is covered by a back-up power supply, so determining which ones are relevant to keeping your hospital running smoothly is vital. An analysis will ensure that patients’ records are safely backed-up and stored, and perhaps the back-up is kept in a separate storage room that relies on a separate support system to ensure consistent service. A detailed analysis will have a myriad of different aspects to ensure that proper care is maintained when the power is out, making it a vital aspect to preparing for emergency outages.
Install Backup Emergency Generators
Being prepared with backup generators is one of the most critical steps of an outage backup plan. Backup generators ensure that the lights stay on and service can continue, at least in an emergency capacity.
Be Ready with Fuel Reserves
Shortage of fuel can strand ambulances on the road and prevent backup generators from working. The business continuity plan should determine how much fuel the entire hospital needs to keep ambulances and generators running efficiently, and then make plans to keep that amount available.
Keeping fuel on-site poses its own problems.Fuel can degrade when stored for long periods of time, making storing fuel on-site a hazard. But relying solely on external fuel deliveries means that poor road conditions could potentially delay critically-needed fuel. Hospitals need to carefully plan out how to receive fuel reserves in a variety of different circumstances to ensure that fuel is always available. Contact a reliable fuel delivery service, such as Specialty Fuel Services, to ensure the hospital continues to run as smoothly as possible during a power cut.
Be Prepared to Transfer Patients
Transfering or denying patients may be necessary, depending on the disaster and circumstances within the hospital during an outage. Critical patients who need certain types of care may benefit better if moved outside the disaster zone, at least temporarily.
Conduct Regular Power Outage Drills
To test your generators and devices, and to prepare hospital staff, conduct outage drills regularly. Additionally, test and service generators on a routine basis, to ensure they’re working properly and to prevent degradation.
Conclusion
Having a fool-proof power outage business continuity plan is a must for every hospital and medical facility. Utilizing this Emergency Preparedness Checklist ensures that a hospital has a suitable emergency plan that will allow its services to continue with minimal interruption in case of a power outage.