Regional Referral Hospital

Regional referral hospital — power resilience

A regional referral hospital needed absolute certainty that theatres, ICU and critical wards would ride through mains failures. The existing changeover arrangement was manual, slow and untested — and every transfer risked tripping sensitive medical equipment.

The challenge

Critical loads shared distribution with general services, so a fault on a non-essential circuit could threaten life-safety supplies. Generator changeover took minutes and depended on a technician being on site. There was no monitoring, so failures announced themselves as outages.

What NPE built

• ✓Load segregation: critical, essential and non-essential loads split onto dedicated distribution boards
• ✓Automatic transfer switching with motorised incomers and electro-mechanical interlocking on the critical path
• ✓Generator control with automatic mains-failure start-up and supervised retransfer
• ✓Selectivity study and breaker coordination so a downstream fault cannot take out a critical board
• ✓24/7 remote monitoring of supply state, transfer events and generator health

The results

Since commissioning, the critical path has ridden through every mains event without a single trip on theatre or ICU supplies. Transfers complete faster than equipment hold-up times, so clinical staff simply do not notice them. The hospital’s engineering team now sees supply state in real time instead of finding out from the wards.