Woman in Her 70s Dies During Heart Surgery... Cause Revealed After 5 Years: "Power Outage"

Unable to Use Medical Equipment for 10 Minutes Due to Power Outage
Exact Cause of the Outage Still Unidentified

A woman undergoing heart surgery at a hospital in the United Kingdom died during the procedure, and controversy has arisen after it was revealed that her cause of death was a sudden power outage. On August 15 (local time), foreign media outlets such as The Independent and BBC reported that Jean Dye, aged 77, died while undergoing surgery for heart disease at Scunthorpe General Hospital in September 2020, and that the cause was a sudden power failure.

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According to the coroner's report on the circumstances of the surgery, an unexpected 10-minute interruption in power supply during the operation prevented the medical staff from using essential equipment. As a result, the surgical team was unable to continue the procedure. Paul Smith, the senior coroner for Greater Lincolnshire, explained the findings by stating, "Considering all possibilities, if there had been no power outage, the patient would have survived." He added, "The exact cause of the outage has not been identified. Although a fault within the circuit was suspected, it did not meet the necessary criteria." He further warned, "If the hospital does not take action regarding its entire electrical system, there is a risk of similar fatal incidents occurring in the future."

Coroner Smith also emphasized, "If hospital staff had known the exact cause of the outage at the time and had been able to reset the circuit without waiting for an engineer to arrive, the interruption caused by the power failure could have been much shorter. Such differences of mere seconds or minutes can have a decisive impact on a patient's survival."

Even in some hospitals in Korea, concerns about power outages persisted as recently as about a decade ago. As a result, current medical law requires that intensive care units must be equipped with uninterruptible power systems. Today, not only intensive care units, but also operating rooms, emergency rooms, delivery rooms, and neonatal units-all areas with critical medical equipment-are required to have their own backup power systems capable of supplying electricity for a certain period in the event of a power outage. Additionally, hospitals of a certain size are also required to have uninterruptible power supply (UPS) devices to maintain a stable voltage in case of sudden voltage changes, power failures, or frequency fluctuations.