Electrical fault in new wing of San Fernando General Hospital causes brief outage

RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

rad­hi­[email protected]

Crews from the Trinidad and To­ba­go Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC) worked along­side tech­ni­cal staff at the South West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (SWRHA) on Sun­day to re­store elec­tric­i­ty to sec­tions of the new wing of the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, near the Ac­ci­dent and Emer­gency (A&E) de­part­ment, af­ter an elec­tri­cal break­er failed, plung­ing parts of the fa­cil­i­ty in­to dark­ness.

Hos­pi­tal sources de­scribed the in­ci­dent as “a black Sun­day in the A&E De­part­ment,” claim­ing that non-clin­i­cal ar­eas were left with­out pow­er and al­leg­ing that back­up gen­er­a­tors were not func­tion­ing. Some sources al­so re­port­ed that el­e­va­tors were out of ser­vice, forc­ing pa­tients to be trans­port­ed via South West am­bu­lances, with cer­tain ser­vices be­ing car­ried out man­u­al­ly.

When Guardian Me­dia vis­it­ed the scene, am­bu­lances were parked at the bay, the main doors to the new wing were open, and no pa­tients were present. An em­ploy­ee who re­quest­ed anonymi­ty said staff had to use flash­lights in­side the swel­ter­ing build­ing while teams worked to re­store pow­er. Ques­tions were al­so raised about the main­te­nance of back­up gen­er­a­tors.

How­ev­er, SWRHA chair­man Anil Go­sine strong­ly de­nied claims that gen­er­a­tors failed or that pa­tient care was dis­rupt­ed. He said the out­age, caused by a break­er is­sue in the new wing hous­ing the A&E De­part­ment, was brief.

“The ICU nev­er went down—on­ly the bed bu­reau, which is main­ly ad­min­is­tra­tive,” Go­sine said, in­sist­ing that clin­i­cal ser­vices con­tin­ued un­in­ter­rupt­ed and that no pa­tients had to be moved be­cause of the pow­er is­sue.

Health Min­is­ter Lack­ram Bo­doe al­so sought to re­as­sure the pub­lic. “The mat­ter is be­ing dealt with by the chair­man and CEO of the SWRHA with the in­put and as­sis­tance of T&TEC. I’m as­sured that pa­tient ser­vices are not sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­pact­ed at this time,” he said.

Dr Bo­doe added that the new Board has been man­dat­ed to ad­dress out­stand­ing main­te­nance is­sues at var­i­ous SWRHA fa­cil­i­ties, which they have been ac­tive­ly re­view­ing since tak­ing of­fice. Teams were work­ing to re­place the de­fec­tive break­er, he con­firmed.