Care for emergency electrical power supply.

Felix Malcher Motta Aidar Neto

Going through a power outage in a healthcare facility without consequences is undoubtedly a huge challenge for the hospital administrator and the leadership teams and committees whose responsibilities involve the maintenance and use of electrical power in their work areas. In this article, we will address the aspects related to the technology administrator who maintains direct and constant contact with the technological resources in healthcare and what they can do to minimize incidents during periods of power outage in a hospital. Among the thousands of available technological resources, there is the auxiliary power generator (GMG - motor generator group) and its logic of operation, maintenance, and testing. The failure of a GMG can lead to situations of greater or lesser risk within the hospital. In this sense, understanding the magnitude of adverse effects caused by this failure is a proactive and relevant activity as it allows evaluating the hospital's major vulnerabilities in situations of total absence of electrical power (Blackout) or partial absence of electrical power (Brownout). Answering questions beforehand such as: What is the impact of the failure on my organization? What services do we fail to offer? What diverse autonomies do we have for gases, batteries, fuel, vacuum system, air conditioning, etc., that help the hospital design preventive measures for cases of power outage? Santos Dumont Hospital (SDH) in São José dos Campos - SP, is a practically new facility whose alternative power generation capacity has a contingency plan for cases of power outage, which has been improved every year. The GMG is capable of meeting the entire hospital load. In total, it has a capacity of 450 KVA, sufficient power to serve the entire hospital. It uses a stationary type electric generator capable of working without being turned off indefinitely, meaning its operating regime is permanent and different from an emergency generator that was not designed to work indefinitely.