By DELPHINE ZULU
and CHUSA SICHONE –
THE University Teaching Hospital (UTH) in Lusaka has been grappling with inadequate generators as the existing ones cannot cater for the entire institution.
Some doctors operating from the morgue said in an exclusive interview during the week that the fridges at the mortuary needed enough power as the current generators were not fully operational.
The doctors said the existing generators did not cater for the entire institution whenever there was a power outage.
UTH spokesperson Mwenya Mulenga said the hospital currently had more than eight generators servicing critical sections, but that the generator which used to provide power to the entire hospital broke down.
Mr Mulenga, however, said the ministry of Health was in the process of buying a new generator for UTH to supply power to the entire institution.
“We have generator sets (gensets) which are placed in different sections, departments and areas although we have not yet covered all the sections in the hospital, but that is where we are going. We had a genset that used to cover all the sections, but it stopped working.
“We are trying to buy another genset. The ministry of Health has actually put it on our budget and we are expecting it to be procured any time soon, that’s what we were told,” he said.
The generators cater for the Intensive Care Unit, theaters and laboratory, among other critical areas.
Mr Mwenya also said that not all the generators currently in use were in perfect condition as some were as old as the institution itself and thus developed faults from time to time.
He dispelled assertions by some patients that UTH was not spared by the load shedding Zambia has been experiencing, saying Zesco had put the institution on a special power supply grid which prevented the hospital from having power blackouts.
Mr Mulenga, however, said UTH only experienced power outages whenever the entire nation was plunged into darkness.
He further said that he was not aware that some fridges at the mortuary were not working effectively owing to load shedding.