Investigating of Safety Standards and Performance of Emergency Power Diesel Generators in Hospitals of Tabriz, Iran

Introduction: The risk of power outages is a serious risk that in needed situations the emergency power supply system employs in a hospital, such as diesel generators and UPSs can be used. The purpose of this study is to investigate the safety and maintenance standards of emergency power generators of diesel generators in Tabriz hospitals. This is a descriptive analytic cross-sectional study which was done in 2015 in 18 hospitals of Tabriz. Data collected with a checklist which was created based on national standards. This checklist included 87 items which were categorized in 15 groups. Data were analyzed using SPSS v.19. Results: Average compliance with the safety and maintenance standards of the diesel generator in the standards of 111 questions and the standards of 87 questions were 61.4% and 52.8% respectively. In terms of compliance with the 19 standards, the "ventilation" standards and the "daily visit" standards were the lowest and highest in hospitals, respectively, with 28.94 and 96.24, respectively. There was a significant direct relation between compliance with the standards for diesel generator with hospital bed (P value = 0.01) and total power generation capacity by generators (P value = 0.05) Conclusion: The results of this study indicate a low level of safety and maintenance for emergency systems in hospitals. These scores are not suitable for a system called "Emergency", and if there are no interventions in this area; hospitals will face many problems in the event of natural disasters and human error.