Hospital's Darkest Day Has Staff Coping Carefully With Light Duties
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday November 23, 1999
The corridors were dark in the Royal Women's Hospital yesterday, with here and there the odd torch to show a doorway. In the wards, nurses did what paperwork they could wearing miners' lamps.
In the nurseries, too, it was torches and lamps, wielded by nurses to change the babies' nappies and check their cords. There were no cups of tea in the staff rooms, no television sets on, no computers, no air-conditioning.
In the delivery suite there was a generator keeping emergency power up for the monitors and resuscitation carts, but no hot meals and no hot water.
For Mrs Rowena Russell, who gave birth to Charlotte Olivia at 9.35 yesterday morning, that was the cruellest cut of the powerless day.
``I've just spent 12 hours throwing up and having a baby, and now I can't even have a shower," she said.
The Royal Women's Hospital was without all power mains and emergency yesterday between 6am and 2pm. Power needed to be connected to the new psychiatric unit being built next door: at the same time, the power system in the women's hospital was being upgraded.
Staff have known the day was coming for several months and prospective patients were sent letters over the past two weeks.
The operating suites were not affected, as they are in the Campus Centre, a separate building in the centre of the Randwick hospital complex shared by Royal Women's, Sydney Children's and Prince of Wales. Emergencies could be handled, but all elective and day surgery was cancelled.
The 14 babies in the neo-natal critical care ward were moved into the operating suite recovery ward on Sunday and the day surgery unit was yesterday being used as a high-dependency ward for women who needed monitors.
But the rest of the population of the hospital, patients and staff, struggled on without the amenities modern power systems can give.
``It is like camping out," said Ms Barbara Jones, the nursing unit manager in Oxford ward.
``We think we might do it once a week. There are no patients, it is nice and quiet, we are all getting fit climbing the stairs and not using the lifts."
As many patients as could be were discharged on Sunday.
In the gynaecology ward, there were only eight patients, compared with 19 on Monday last week.
The nurses in particular liked not having air-conditioning. Royal Women's is a new hospital building: many of the rooms have balconies and there are many windows, most of which were open.
Patients said they had heard rumours it was a cost-cutting exercise. But the public affairs manager for the hospital, Ms Phyllis Sakinofsky, said if anything it cost the hospital more, as extra staff were rostered on to act as sentinels in corridors and at the hospital entrance, to show visitors and patients their way through the dark.
``Our headlamps are all here because of readiness for Y2K," she said, ``and this a very good dummy run for that, even though we had our test two months ago and everything was fine. We moved the hospital not very long ago and all the staff are amenable to change. No-one is fazed by this."
No staff, at least. Ms Russell's baby had to be delivered with the help of a hand-pumped vacuum extractor. She had known that yesterday would be without power and had thought: ``What's the bet I have the baby in the dark."
``But at no stage do we think we got inferior treatment," her husband, Adrian, said.
© 1999 Sydney Morning Herald