The power was off when Dr. Laura Ocasio awoke in Caracas at 5 a.m. on Friday. She took the bus to one of the Venezuelan capital’s largest public hospitals, where she is a surgeon. She quickly realized it was a major shutdown.
“Most of the hospital was dark,” said Ocasio. “The power plant only powered the intensive care unit and the emergency department. We only had one computer on the entire floor where I work.”
On Aug. 30, starting at around 4 a.m., Venezuela experienced a 12-hour blackout that affected 20 of the country’s 23 states. Due to system deficiencies, hospitals were among the first and most affected by this outage.
Ocasio (whom Caplin News is identifying by a pseudonym because she fears persecution in the corrupt South American country) was at the department of surgery when she faced a major challenge. At 10:30 a.m., a 17-year-old boy with acute appendicitis was brought in.
His family became very worried when the surgery coordinator insisted on relocating the boy to another hospital, citing the risk of performing surgery during the outage.
“The coordinator [had] called to suspend all surgeries that day,” Ocasio explained. “However, when we saw that kid in such pain, we decided to perform a physical examination and immediately knew this was an emergency we had to take care of. If not, the outcome could have been deadly.”
The surgical team and the kid’s family were stressed. The doctors started the intervention in a steamy operating room without air conditioning. The laparoscopy machine, which allows safer surgery because it requires just a tiny incision was shut down, forcing them to cut into the patient’s belly, significantly increasing the risk of infection.
“This was not the first time we have to go through immense stress and put our patients at risk during a procedure,” concluded Dr. Ocasio. “We have had to figure out how to keep helping people even in these complicated situations.”
Back in 2019, Venezuela suffered one of the longest blackouts in its history, with a four-day nationwide outage. Nineteen patients died due to the electrical failure in hospitals. Since then, this data has been recorded by the National Hospitals Survey, a study endorsed by the National Academy of Medicine of Venezuela, to account for irregularities and situations in all hospitals in the country, increasing year after year. Dozens of deaths have been recorded.
Indeed, an exiled Venezuelan doctor, Dr. Jose Cerrada, who moved to Miami in 2021 and now works as a medical administrative assistant in California. He explained that he was doing his residency in a government-funded ambulatory in Caracas during the 2019 outage.
“We had a baby girl who fell and cut her head,” he recalls. “We had to suture her forehead with the help of a phone light because we didn’t even have one working light bulb in the building.”
“In the ambulatory section, we did not have a power plant. It was in a very rural area, and it was very dangerous to attend to patients in these conditions,” he added. “The whole situation was very hard. It definitely was caused by a lack of resources and attention to rural facilities.”
The complicated political situation in Venezuela has worsened the health system’s failure. The government is responsible for facilitating hospitals and all public facilities with enough resources.
The data recorded by National Hospitals Survey show that power blackouts left 75 dead in 2020, and 141 in 2021. The spike in deaths in 2021 was related to the coronavirus pandemic.
“The irregular energy supply obviously had consequences for these cases,” stated the NHS report.
However, the government blames the opposition.
After last week’s failure, Freddy Náñez, Venezuela’s minister of communications, said that “workers were trying to restore electricity.” He added, “nobody is going to steal the peace of Venezuelans,” alleging sabotage by the opposition in a video shared on his social media accounts during the power outage.
Maduro blamed this electrical blackout on a “fascist attack.”
When the power was reconnected after 12 hours, the hospital where Dr. Ocasio worked kept functioning at half capacity, awaiting more stable power, which didn’t come for the rest of the weekend.
Dr. Rita Moss (whom Caplin News is also identifying by a pseudonym because she fears persecution), a resident internist who works in the hospitalization area of the same hospital as Ocasio, explained that “At 2 p.m., the power came back, but it only lasted 15 minutes. Because of this, we had to postpone all exams and analyses scheduled for the rest of that day to prevent damage to the machines.”
“During the weekend, diagnostic services were still not operating due to short power outages,” Moss concluded with frustration,
Fortunately, the teen’s appendicitis operation went well. Sweaty doctors opened the wound, removed infected tissue with backup equipment and closed it safely.
An hour after the procedure, the boy was stable and recovering from surgery.
“It was another day of looking for solutions in a system that does not provide any,” said Ocasio. “I try to keep calm, because this is something we experience every day.”
Moving forward, all the doctors interviewed for this story said they expect further problems because of the failed power grid. The most recent NHS report expresses that doctors, patients, and their families are “desperate due to the implications of not having fundamental resources to save lives.”
“I hope they [government] will improve health facilities, from the most rural to the largest public hospital,” concluded Moss. “They owe it to the people.”
