Health and energy are interdependent factors, as stated by the World Health Organization. As a health clinic manager, doctor, nurse, or technician, the most important part of your job is keeping patients healthy. To achieve this, you depend on various factors, including trained personnel, physical facilities, medical equipment and instruments, a supply chain system, effective staff management, and communications, data collection, and outreach capabilities. Each of these will benefit from access to reliable energy service.
Electricity keeps the clinic lights on, enables the vaccine refrigerator to run, keeps blood supplies safe, provides power to lab equipment, and allows your staff to communicate via phone or computer. As your clinic adds new programs and serves larger populations, the demand for electricity will rise. These increases in energy demand may be sudden, such as during the preparation period for a vaccination program, or may happen gradually, for instance, when lighting and equipment are used for longer periods of time each day to serve growing numbers of patients.
Health facilities, particularly those located in rural areas, typically lack “grid power” and are forced to generate their own electricity to meet energy needs. In contrast to grid-connected facilities, when off-grid sites increase their energy use (which can result from both adding new equipment and poor use of existing equipment), the impacts can be more severe than just paying higher electricity bills. If electricity runs out, lives can be lost. Thus, effective management of off-grid energy systems needs to be given as high a priority as management of other vital medical systems at your facilities.
Regardless of the off-grid energy source—diesel/kerosene generator, solar panels, wind, or hydropower—the cost of electricity from on-site generation systems tends to be expensive. Careful management of energy consumption can help to minimize the risk of electric shortages as well as capital investments in energy equipment, thereby reducing operating expenses.
Powering Health: Energy Management in Your Health Facility is a resource for health professionals seeking to make better use of limited energy supplies. The guide assumes your health care facility already has electricity access, but presumes that more effective management of this limited resource will improve your ability to provide routine, quality health services on demand. Its focus is on three areas: why and how to implement energy management in your facility, forming an energy team, with associated roles, responsibilities, and tools for support, and the importance of energy-efficient practices and equipment.
Energy management enables health facilities to realize more benefit per unit of electricity. Managing energy is similar to managing money—you want to make sure the money you have now is enough to purchase the food you will eat today, as well as to pay your child’s school fees at the end of the month. In the same way, you want to make sure you have enough energy to power your facility today, while ensuring sufficient energy to operate your facility tomorrow and the next day. This takes careful planning.
Energy management is as much about human behavior and management as it is about technology. The actions of your staff will have a major impact on the amount of energy your health center consumes. This manual will help explain this critical relationship and guide you in developing an effective energy management strategy for your facility.
Energy management determines not only how much electricity you have available to run your facility, but also how you use that power. Energy management will help you to maximize the lifespan of energy systems through proper operation, use, and maintenance, keep energy costs as low as possible so more money is available for medicines and other important medical necessities at your facility, and ensure that energy is available whenever and wherever it is needed. Having reliable energy can save patients’ lives. As health care services improve through new equipment and practices, a reliable energy supply becomes increasingly important.