Kas Mohammed, Vice-President of Digital Energy at Schneider Electric, looks at two of the more common electrical issues encountered in hospitals and other healthcare facilities – power factor distortion and harmonics – and how to address them.
We are at the beginning of a new chapter. The pandemic has changed our lives and businesses forever. While we will continue to strive for greater efficiency, resilience and robustness will become key priorities as society looks to protect itself against any future shocks. Central to building economic resilience is maintaining a functioning and healthy populace. The last 12 months have shown the vital, and often overlooked, importance of the healthcare sector, which acts as the foundation of society in general. As well as supporting key workers, we must invest in healthcare infrastructure to meet the challenges ahead.
The importance of the electrical infrastructure within healthcare is indisputable. We rely on electrical equipment to keep our loved ones safe and healthy, diagnose conditions, and find new forms of treatment. Hospitals, therefore, require an extremely reliable electrical infrastructure, immune to power failures, and resilient against any issues.
Healthcare organisations face an average cost of £530,000 per outage, according to a Ponemon Institute/ Emerson Network Power report. This excludes loss of life and any indirect impacts of outages in these critical environments. As a speaker in a global panel discussion of healthcare executives recently put it, ‘the potential costs of unreliable power in healthcare are unimaginable’
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