Patient services were interrupted due to a power failure Thursday at the Albany Memorial Campus.
At about 6:15 Thursday morning, a routine test went wrong at Albany Memorial hospital. "It was a long day, though I gotta tell ya," said
Meredith Robinson, Chief Nursing Officer at St. Peter's Health Partners. "I was on my way to, actually, St. Peters in Albany, when this all started, and I diverted myself and went to Albany Memorial. I myself was in the building all day,” she said.
Officials at the North Albany hospital, which is part of the broader St. Peter’s Health Partners system, say an electrical switch malfunctioned during a routine back-up power generator test. The misfire triggered safety protocols, including the suspension of all patient services. That meant patients in the Emergency Department had to be sent to other area hospitals.
“There was no immediate safety issue to anybody that was in the building, because there are steps that we put into place when things like the fire sprinkler systems or the fire suppression systems have issues. So we do have risk plans and mitigation plans that exist in the background to make sure that if people do need to be in the building, that things are done safely," Robinson said.
The building itself didn't lose power, but the fire-detection and air-conditioning systems went down during a routine test.
“So our facilities team, you know, once a month goes in, they test everything, you know, they essentially stimulate power disruptions to make sure that everything flows and triggers and does all of those electrical things that it's supposed to do," said Robinson. "We always have those testings done, and then we do have. plans that exist in the background to make sure that if there is a failure, that we have things set up and we know what to do.”
Robinson says the decision to close down to patients was made "out of an abundance of caution."
"We had a failure of our transfer switch, which is one of the switches that, I guess, really controls the power from our generator to our power distribution system. And once that was discovered, the team worked, our facilities team worked, to see if it was a fixable problem or something a little bit bigger. What we discovered was that it was probably a little bit bigger, and we needed to have a couple of technicians come in to work on it,” Robinson said.
State regulations require facilities that treat patients to have a working backup generator.
New York State Department of Health officials say Memorial Hospital followed protocol, letting DOH know there was an outage and informing the agency that a plan was being implemented to divert the emergency department.
“I have a contact at the Department of Health who I was speaking to all day," said Robinson. "The Department of Health was aware of the situation, was aware of all of the things that we were doing to correct the situation, and then they were obviously made aware when the situation was resolved.”
Once repairs were completed, Robinson says the E.R. was cleared to see patients at 9 p.m. Outpatient services returned to normal schedules Friday morning. Patient appointments impacted by Thursday's closure are being rescheduled
