News, HYDERABAD: In a tragic incident, the Telangana state-run Gandhi Hospital, a premier 1,200-bed medical facility in the Hyderabad city, is under a cloud after 21 patients died on Friday(Jul 22) and the medical staff blamed power outages for the deaths.

According to the Media Reports, some doctors said electricity first tripped around 3pm and then continued to do so at regular intervals. Although there were four generators on standby, the hospital claimed they had developed snags and could not be used after power lines were later cut off, to find the cause of the tripping.

Majorly the deaths occurred in speciality wards, including the surgical intensive care unit, neo-natal intensive care unit, respiratory intensive care unit, acute medical care unit and the emergency ward, all of which were affected by Friday’s power failure.

Telangana health minister Dr. C Laxma Reddy said it would be wrong to directly blame the deaths in a top state-run tertiary hospital on the power outages as they get “maximum number of last-stage cases”.

“In my 14 years of working at this hospital, on an average, 10 patients die every day,” said Dr. R Raghu, general secretary (Gandhi Hospital unit), Telangana Government Doctors’ Association.

Professor C V Chalam who is the superintendent in charge of Gandhi Hospital said “Each of the 21 deaths would have to be probed to determine if any of them was directly or indirectly linked to the blackout. We will take up this exercise on Monday.”

When asked about what went wrong with the power supply, Professor Chalam, who was at the hospital till 12.30 am supervising the seven engineers struggling to restore power supply, said “There is a three-phase power supply to the hospital, but with the lines tripping on and off, our staff found it difficult to manage uninterrupted supply.”

Meanwhile, a senior doctor added “I used my mobile phone torch to carry out an emergency surgery on a 28-year old man with an infected intestine,” who was on duty in one of the affected departments.

Though Ambu-bags providing hand-pressed oxygen were used on all patients who were on ventilators, the source said it was possible that some of the attendants may have administered the gas incorrectly. This job is usually handled by hospital staff, but the task was left to the attendants on Friday.

Southern Power Distribution Company Limited’s Secunderabad divisional engineer Rajaram Reddy confirmed Friday’s power failure in the hospital. He said the supply had been hit between 9pm and 10.45pm due to some problems at the local sub-station.”We restored the supply at 10.45pm. We are aware that the hospital had some trouble with its own generating equipment.”