A malfunctioning transformer is being blamed for a power outage that occurred at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex on Monday, which forced the evacuation of patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and affected other medical services.
Chief executive officer (CEO) of the North Central Regional Health Authority (NCRHA) Davlin Thomas, revealed in an Express report that approximately two weeks ago there were upgrades to the transformers at the hospital.
Early Monday they had a malfunction of the transformer and load-shedding took place in order to mitigate the situation for critical patients.
Thomas told the media house, ““Because it is one of the main transformers—and we do have emergency contingency transformers—but they require us hooking up to that transformer as the contingency, we felt it necessary to transfer our critical patients within the system,” he said.
Eight ICU patients were transferred to the Arima Hospital and the hospital was working to get a second transformer hooked up and functioning.
Thomas emphasised that the evacuation of patients was done to mitigate against any problems with these patients.
“We also brought in three contingency supply generators from a private company to mitigate against any other kinds of possibilities,” Thomas said. “When we move from generator to generator we will have to shut down supply and move to an external generator for that period and so we moved the critical patients in the interim.”
In response to questions, Thomas said the same company that supplied and upgraded the transformers was working to determine what went wrong and to resolve the situation.