Emergency generators' critical role examined

The research evidence cited within this article relates to the reliability of emergency diesel generators, and concludes by recommending that NHS organisations urgently review their corporate strategy, business continuity plans, backlog maintenance schedules, etc., as it appears that these units are not operating to the 99.95% reliability figure suggested by the National Approved Codes of Practice (ACOP), but instead at reliabilities of around 98.5%. The practical interpretation of this lower reliability figure is that for a typical NHS Trust operating 10 emergency diesel generators, it can be surmised that they can expect to experience 1.81 failures/year, while under test conditions When combining the requirements for the generators to operate under test plus actual power outage conditions, with the 'fragility' of the power supply from the main electrical undertaker, then the Trust can expect to experience >1.81 failures/year, some of which could occur during a power outage. In putting together this article I conducted a small 'straw poll' of NHS acute hospital sites, which confirmed that the failure of emergency diesel generators was far from being a rare event, and indeed when the historical records were compared with the research papers cited, they showed that such failures were predictable, and in most cases preventable, i.e. certain.