Intensive Care Unit Patient succumbs to power failure

Tragic death in clinic patient dies after power failure

10/31/2013

In Schwerin it has come in the intensive care unit of a Helios clinic to a tragic death. A 29-year-old man was hospitalized with life-threatening head injuries about ten days ago after suffering an accident at work. When the power supply to the hospital collapsed, the emergency generator was indeed on, but failed for reasons still unclear reasons, the current transmission to the intensive care, said the hospital spokesman Christian Becker.

A failure of the power supply is a particularly critical disorder for hospital operations, since patients rely on life-sustaining technical systems especially in intensive care units or in operating theaters.

Usually there is an emergency plan for such a horror scenario in which the diesel engines turn on within 15 seconds and automatically supply all areas with power. Each hospital should be able to maintain all essential systems in a period of 24 hours via the emergency operation.

In this case, however, the vital devices stopped working, and as the patient's ventilator shut down, a physician had used a manual ventilation technique using a battery-powered device. Likewise its 11 further ventilators failed and also these patients were supplied at short notice by means of the so-called bag ventilation. None of them suffered health damage from the failure. Only the patient from Ukraine died of complications associated with respiratory arrest. The prosecutor now determines whether there is a third party debt and investigates whether the emergency generators worked properly. “Our sympathy goes out to the relatives, "said Becker.

According to information from the NDR, the Schwerin municipal utilities could now clarify the cause of the power outage. According to this, a power line has been cut in the course of construction work in the district of Lankow. This could have led to grid fluctuations, which ultimately disturbed the control unit of the clinic.

The Helios clinics explained, however, that their emergency power supply had worked flawlessly so far and would be checked monthly. There had been no power outage in the operating theaters because of the fact that they were working on batteries without interruption. In order to be well prepared against such failures, tests are always carried out under real conditions. The Ministry of Social Affairs of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern demands a detailed investigation report from the Helios Clinic. (Fr)

Image: Michael Bührke