Contingency Planning for Hospitals

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Can you point me to any threads or links that contain C.P. info. for hospitals in the event of not having power? This is of major concern in the healthcare industry since physicians and nurses would have to revert to 1950s manual procedures(if they were taught and if they were, if they can remember what they were taught) if the power goes out. The majority of the healthcare industry has yet to really address this issue although it has been thrown around in conferences and on-line discussions.

-- Anonymous, September 15, 1998

Answers

Don't almost all hospitals have back-up power generators in the basement? Big diesel ones? One suggestion would be to store enough diesel fuel on site to keep the generators going for at least one month, preferably two.

If the grid is down for much more than a month than we will all be in survival mode anyhow.

-- Anonymous, September 15, 1998


Do you have a diesel generator? How big is it? What percentage of your load is it sized to support(it won't be 100%)? What is the fuel consumption per hour? How much fuel storage do you have on-site? Can you get fuel resuppply in a timely manner? Are the generator loads on a separate "emergency bus" or do you have to strip load off of normal busses to power critical equipment? Can you feed loads between busses if necessary? If you have natural gas can you still operate your kitchen(fire hoods require power)? Where do you stand on your local utility's load shed plan? How do you continue to process your bio-hazard waste stream? How is your PBX powered? ETC...

As you can see there are many issues to begin addressing NOW in your contingency planning process. Good luck!

-- Anonymous, September 16, 1998


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