Updated 11am

Power went out at Mater Dei Hospital on Monday night, with generators failing to kick in for 52 minutes in parts of the building. 

Electricity went out at around 1am.

The outage did not impact essential services.

Life-saving equipment has inbuilt batteries that allow the machines to run when there is no electricity, sources said. Operating theatres also have their own backup systems that remained uninterrupted last night. Sources added that power went out again for a few minutes before 7am.

A Health Ministry spokesperson confirmed that Mater Dei experienced a brief power outage on Monday night.

"While power was maintained in critical equipment in areas such as ITU, NPICU and theatres, other parts of the hospital had an outage for 52 minutes before the in-house engineering team remedied the situation and all normal activity continued.  

"There were no clinical incidents as a result of the fault," she said.

She added that the generator system had been tested on Monday morning and everything was working fine.

A source told Times of Malta there was a drop in electrical supply during the night and one of the generator "switches" failed to kick in. The glitch was later identified and power was restored and successful tests were carried out on the network on Tuesday morning.

An investigation into the incident is ongoing to establish whether the outage was caused because of human error or negligence.

An Enemalta spokesperson, meanwhile, told Times of Malta that power to the hospital from the main grid had remained constant. She could not confirm whether there was a drop or surge in power. 

Last Thursday, Mount Carmel psychiatric hospital patients were left in the dark and heat for more than four hours at night as the hospital’s generators similarly failed to kick in during a power cut.