With more frequency now, hospitals are being managed as big businesses [1] with clients instead of health facilities with patients. Doctors who wish to honor their Hippocratic Oath [2] have to hope that their hospital management has the same ideal of keeping the good of the patient as the highest priority. This was the case last week in the Al Matrya teaching hospital in Egypt, where 4 babies and 2 adults on life support lost their lives due to a 2 hour blackout in the early morning hours and generators failed to kick in once again.Zeinobia [3]writes
Last week Al Matrya educational hospital had seen a tragedy on the 22nd of May 2008 when a power outage took place , yes Power 8 outage took place for two hours leading to the dramatic death of 4 babies in the neonatal intensive care.
You must know before this outage on the 22nd of May , the hospital witnessed an another outage from three weeks before for 5 minutes and you must know that the back up electric generators did not work !!
More important you must know that the administration of that hospital in Cairo that follows the ministry of health knew that. You must know that the administration of that hospital faked the time of death of those infants three hours before the outage so it would escape the legal accountability !!
During the blackout, doctors who were on duty with Dr. Akroot, known in YouTube as akroot4ever [4], recorded on their cellphones their desperate attempts to save these babies’ lives. He explains in the video's description [5] [ar] that the Hospital Administration knew that the generators weren't working since three weeks before the 2 hour blackout the lights were out for five minutes and the generators had failed to kick in, which was unusual, so when the tragedy struck at 3am on May 22nd, the life support machines had no power and this caused the deaths of the babies in the nurseries.
Following, two videos recorded by doctors during the blackout, where the sound of beeping machines, babies crying and doctor's distressed voices accompany images of these same doctors trying do to everything possible to save these babies’ lives: (1 [5], 2, and 2 [6][ar]):
Another video uploaded by akroot4ever shows a patient attached to a monitor that reads vital signs… the only problem is that the monitor is displaying the DEMO options where vitals are represented as standard for a healthy patient, and the patient connected to this monitor has already passed away, unnoticed by most of the staff:
Support is strong for Dr. Akroot according to Zeinobia at the Egyptian Chronicles [7], where the team of doctors are being hailed for their determination to save lives during the crisis and strength to come forth and expose what happened at the Al Matrya educational hospital.