Abstract:
Erratic power supply has been one of the major problems militating against the
effective quality healthcare service delivery in Nigeria, this has made it expedient to
examine and analyse the effects of poor power supply on health facility. This research
work evaluated the technical and cost impacts of erratic power supply on Federal
Medical Centre (FMC), Owo as a case study. In this study, the power source to the
hospital was identified. Determination of the power consumption at Federal Medical
Centre (FMC), Owo was done by calculating the individual power consumption of all
the electrical gadgets such as medical equipment, refrigerators, freezers, fans, air
conditioners, bulbs, laboratory equipments etc in different wards and offices within the
hospital, evaluating the total power consumption by all the electrical gadgets in watts
and kilowatts and converted the total load in kW to kVA using 70% of the total load
as the diversity factor. The technical impact of power supply reliability on health care
delivery at the hospital was evaluated using performance indices and correlation
analysis. The hospital is divided into two zones, each zone of the hospital has a backup
power supply of 500kVA heavy duty generator. The data for the cost of fuel
consumption and the cost of electricity consumptions in kilowatt hour for the period of
twelve months as well as cost of maintenance and death rate for the period of twelve
months (January 2018 to December 2018) were collated from the hospital. Based on
the result obtained from the data analysis using line graphs and bar charts, it was
observed that the cost of fueling the generator as well as cost of maintenance of the
Generator to ensure steady power supply is higher compared to that of power supply
from the national grid for the period studied.
