KURNOOL: Medical facilities, including critical care and surgeries, went for a toss and hundreds of patients at the Kurnool Government General Hospital (KGGH) had to face a harrowing time for nearly five hours with a major power outage on Monday morning.At least ten surgeries had to be postponed as power supply to the hospital was cut off due to transformer failure.
Only two generators were functioning and they are not enough to supply power to the entire building and wards.The power supply was disrupted around 8 am plunging the entire building into darkness. It was restored only after five hours.
On an average in a day, around 2,000 outpatients and 1,100 inpatients are treated at the hospital.
According to hospital superintendent Dr P Chandrasekhar, transformer failure caused the power cut in the hospital. “Some surgeries were postponed, but luckily, there was no death due to power cut,” he said.
On knowing about the issue, Kurnool MP Dr. S Sanjiv Kumar rushed to the hospital. The MP discussed with hospital authorities and directed the Transco officials to set up permanent structure to solve power supply issues which are regularly causing trouble to patients.
Monday’s power cut affected 10 medical wards, five surgical wards, two gynaecology wards, trauma care, burns wards and children’s wards.The district medical and health office which is also located on the hospital premises too was affected. The hospital has only two functional generators which supplied power to acute medical care, casualty, emergency and DR unit.G Ramudu, a patient from Devanakonda, who was admitted to MMS 5 ward, said the doctors did not perform surgery on him due to power cut.
He has been suffering from urinal problems and the operation was supposed to be performed on Monday, but it was postponed to a later date.M Rajasekhar, an attendant from Shareen Nagar in the city, said, “My relative, who has been under treatment at burns ward had to go out and sit under a tree on the premises of the hospital to get some fresh air.”
K Raghu, an attendant of ICU ward patient, feared that his father, who was brought to the hospital three days back after he developed chest pain, might develop more complications.Meanwhile, AP Transco superintendent engineer V Suresh Kumar said there was a problem in the cubicle of the transformer.
“We had restored power by 12 noon,” he said.
Sources said though the power was restored from the transformer by 12 noon, but due to the problem in internal wiring power was restored only after 1 pm.It is also learnt that the hospital authorities did not inform the Transco officials immediately after the power outage.