RAH power outage hit during Australian Medical Association president William Tam’s surgery

A POWER failure at the Royal Adelaide Hospital disrupted surgeries, including one being performed by Australian Medical Association state president Associate Professor William Tam.

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A POWER failure at the Royal Adelaide Hospital disrupted surgeries, including one being performed by Australian Medical Association state president Associate Professor William Tam.

The outage from about 11am on Wednesday was blamed on regular monthly maintenance tests on a generator and lasted about 10 minutes, according to SA Health, although Prof Tam put it at 20 minutes.

“I was in the middle of a procedure and the power went out and the back-up generators must have failed,” Prof Tam said.

AMA president Dr William Tam

“Fortunately there was no harm to my patient, but this is not acceptable. Doctors and patients must have confidence that the new hospital is safe.

“We all have been working with SA Health to fix some ­issues and we appreciate new buildings need some ‘tweaking’, but power reliability is a non-negotiable function.”

The AMA (SA) called on SA Health to address the reliability of power issue as a matter of “extreme urgency”.

A hospital spokesman said that following testing of the generator “the software that controls which electricity source is used did not transfer power from the generator back to mains power, leading to an outage for around 10 minutes in one section of the RAH”.

“While there was disruption to some surgeries, power was restored and the preliminary advice is that no patients’ outcomes were adversely affected. Further examination of the software is under way,” the spokesman said.

I was in the middle of a procedure and the power went out and the back-up generators must have failed

SA Salaried Medical Officers Association industrial officer Bernadette Mulholland questioned why such maintenance was being conducted while patients were in surgery.

“It would be significant in a hospital environment for a generator to not back up quickly, within a few seconds, and taking 10 minutes to respond could have consequences for patients in surgery or in an intensive care unit,” she said.

Opposition health spokesman Stephen Wade said the power failure puts additional stress on a hospital that is already under stress.

“We know that overnight (on Tuesday night) the Royal Adelaide Hospital was so overcrowded that they needed to have patients in recovery bays and that there was ambulance ramping during the night,” he said.

“A power failure like this would have disrupted a hospital already trying to recover from chronic overcrowding.

“In recent weeks we have had a major battery spill, a significant power failure and chronic blowouts in elective surgery wait times.

“An internal email obtained on Wednesday states in the ‘last few days at the RAH have seen reduced discharges and as a result we have run out of bed capacity ... 18 elected surgery cases to get in’. ”

Mr Wade said five months after the $2.3 billion hospital opened it was no longer acceptable to blame problems on teething issues.

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