Healthcare Facilities and Power Outages
What Does a Power Outage Mean to a Medical Facility?
Power outages happen every year and can cause a wide variety of problems. The biggest issue with a power outage is loss of lighting for high-risk surgical procedures and the potential for black outs in rooms containing no emergency lights. With no power also means loss of respiratory devices and other critical equipment. These can affect patients in intensive care, neonatal, or cardiac units. Facility wide issues also will occur such as loss of HVAC systems which rely on the electricity for heating, cooling, and ventilation. This could result in the potential loss of hospitals and healthcare facilities usage and access to their vital equipment needed for saving lives.
How Prepared for Power Outages is your Healthcare Facility?
Response plans, although should be followed, can be flexible depending on time, location, and event. You should have a generalized plan with what you should do, where you should go, and who you should contact. Leaders should have a meeting with their team to discuss and answer the following list of need to know questions.
- What is my electric utility companies contact information in the event of a power outage?
- Where is my facility located on the distribution network? What other healthcare facilities are located on the same circuit?
- Have you discussed with your utility company if they consider your facility a priority when responding to a power outage or shortage of electricity supply?
- Do you have procedures to prioritize emergency power allocation to key resources? (i.e. HVAC systems, Ventilator’s, patient monitors)
How an Uninterruptible Power System Can Help:
Some medical equipment is very sensitive to electricity changes where even switching over to a backup generator can cause issues. Uninterruptible power systems do not have the switch over time that most generators do and will ensure all your equipment stays safe in a power outage. Medication and vaccines that are not on a backup power system can result in a massive loss in resources.
Learn how long medication and vaccines can be left without power
A big advantage of an uninterruptible power system is the peace of mind knowing that your patients and their medications will stay safe.
Contact Medi-Products today to ensure that your healthcare facility is worry free in a power outage.
To answer even more of your questions and find additional solutions to problems that could affect your medical facility or laboratory, check out these other articles from the Medi-Products blog including:
Avoid a Vaccine Refrigerator Power Outage During a Winter Storm
How To Keep Medicine Cold During A Power Outage
and
How Many Amps Does a Refrigerator Use? - How to Find It's Energy Usage
Additionally, here are some other trusted resources you may also find helpful that we used when conducting our research:
https://files.asprtracie.hhs.gov/documents/aspr-tracie-ta-power-outage-plans-redacted-10-31-18.pdf
