TTH denies claims that entire facility had no power during Friday evening's blackout in NR

The Tamale Teaching Hospital has blamed Friday evening's power outage in parts of the hospital on a faulty generator set of the hospital.
A power outage at the Obstetrics and Gynecological and the medical blocks of the hospital on Friday evening, following a blackout in the Northern part of Ghana caused stir and outrage among patients and patient relatives, some of who took to social media to express their disappointment.
Peeved patient relatives questioned why a teaching hospital offering critical medical services will be affected by a general power outage when it is supposed to have a generator set to power the facility when the National grid is off.
However, the hospital explained that the blackout affected the two blocks because one of its six generator units broke down due to earlier power fluctuations.
Zuberu Aliu, Deputy Director, Public Affairs told GhanaWeb the hospital is working around the clock to fix the problem.
“The hospital as a teaching facility has a number of standby generators that supply power to the various sub BMCs, when the National grid goes off. So we have about six of them currently installed but out of the six, one which supports the two blocks is technically challenged.
Our engineers have been on it, we have even asked for a second opinion by inviting an outside expert to come and provide support to fix that one and as we speak, we still have that challenge” he explained.
He said the hospital at all times ensures that all critical departments have power, hence it was false to claim that the entire hospital goes off during general blackouts.
“The hospital is a big community and it is challenged with this particular issue of power to the extent that sometimes our equipment even get damaged when the national grid usually fluctuates and so we’re aware that one portion may lose power but that doesn’t mean that when you’re at one end and you don’t have power it means that the whole hospital is in darkness.” Mr Zuberu said.
He added that “we always have supply of power to critical areas like the emergency, ICU, the laboratories, where the CT Scans and other machines are, among others. When there’s even power cuts at the Ostetrics and gynecological unit, we move clients who need emergency surgeries to the other theatres”.