NEWBORN babies and young children on oxygen at the Colonial War Memorial Hospital in Suva had to be manually resuscitated when the power went out during a fire emergency.
The outage occurred after a blaze destroyed the old Birthing Unit building on Amy St, directly opposite the hospital.
Assistant Minister for Health and Medical Services Dr Penioni Ravunawa confirmed the incident, saying staff responded quickly and calmly.
“Accidents like that do happen, it’s unexpected,” Dr Ravunawa said. “But we thank particularly the Children’s Ward Hospital at CWM for being able to continue to look after their patients during those critical hours.”
While he did not reveal how long the power was out, Dr Ravunawa said no lives were lost.
“I can report that there was no death and that’s a big thing to understand with the resource constraint that we have and with the situation like that, that our medical personnel are able to manage their patients well during that time.” He said the hospital’s backup generator had to be turned on manually.
“The generator we have at the CWM Hospital, especially on the west wing, does not turn on automatically. It’s an old one donated by the Government of Japan.
“At the moment we are putting it in our submission for improvement of electrification work, not only in CWM, also in Labasa, which has started and is completing soon. And also, in Navua and Tavua.”
Dr Ravunawa stressed that all health centres needed improved power systems.
“The demands of service have increased, population has increased, and also, we need to improve our electricity in all our health centres because we are also putting in new machines. So, there obviously has to be an upgrade with our electrical system.”
