A hospital cannot run on a schedule of outages
Most buildings can wait for the power to come back. An operating theatre, a neonatal unit and a dialysis ward cannot. Keeping hospitals energised through the winter of 2022 was one of the most urgent supply operations of the war.
Most of a country can wait a few hours for the power to come back. A hospital cannot. An operation in progress, a ventilator, an incubator, a dialysis session, a blood bank refrigerator and a vaccine store all fail on different timescales, and none of them tolerate a six-hour outage.
Through the winter of 2022 partners delivered generators of every size, fuel, uninterruptible power supplies, and the electrical work to connect them properly to critical circuits rather than through an extension lead. Regional hospitals, maternity units and dialysis centres were prioritised.
The detail that matters
Installing a generator is not the same as donating one. It has to be sized to the load, connected to a changeover panel, fuelled, serviced and tested. A great deal of the useful assistance in this period was not the equipment but the engineering that made the equipment work.
Nobody made a speech about switchgear. It kept intensive care running.
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