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Electricity supply to Chattogram Medical College Hospital was suspended for around two and a half hours on Saturday for maintenance work, causing considerable suffering to patients and their attendants.
Power remained off from around 8:45am to 11:15am, disrupting hospital services. The supply was restored after hospital authorities contacted the relevant electricity officials.
Several medical devices stopped functioning during the outage, while ticket-counter services were also disrupted. Some urgent medical tests, including X-rays and ultrasonography, could not be conducted.
The hospital authorities kept some services running by using generators.
Abdul Mannan, an attendant of a patient, said the outage caused serious inconvenience, particularly for patients suffering in the heat. He said he was unable to have an X-ray and ultrasonography done during the outage.
Hospital Director Brigadier General Mohammad Taslim Uddin said the disruption occurred due to a problem with the electricity supply. The authorities contacted the electricity department after seeing the patients’ suffering, following which power was restored.
Mohammad Akbar Hossain, assistant director (public relations) of the Power Development Board, said the supply had been suspended for emergency maintenance and that prior notice had been issued.
Although the shutdown was scheduled to continue until 1pm, electricity was restored to the hospital around 11:15am.