“I would like the international community to commit to a deadline and funding to electrify all healthcare facilities,” said
Salvatore Vinci, an adviser on sustainable energy at the World Health Organization and a member of its Cop28 delegation. “We have solutions now that were not available 10 years ago – there is no reason why babies should be dying today because there is not electricity to power their incubators.“It’s a low-hanging fruit. There is nothing stopping us,” he said.
About 1 billion people around the world do not have access to a healthcare facility with a stable electricity connection, including 433 million in low-income countries who rely on facilities with no electricity at all, according to the WHO’s Energising Health: Accelerating Electricity Access in Healthcare Facilities report, which was published in January, and co-authored by Vinci.
Electricity is the lifeblood of a functioning healthcare facility, not only powering devices such as ventilators and cardiac monitors, but providing basics amenities such as lighting. Without these basic facilities, even routine conditions can be deadly or lead to complications. Healthcare facilities in countries vulnerable to the impact of extreme weather events will often experience outages because of storms and flooding.
“We don’t know how many people die each year because of power outages. Nobody puts ‘power outage’ as a cause of death on a death certificate,” said Hippolite Amadi, bioengineering professor at Imperial College London. “As we speak, patients in low- and middle-income countries are dying due to power outages and poor lighting. They’re dying because their life-support machines were switched off, or because they have been given the wrong medication by staff who cannot see what they are doing, or because the surgeon working in the dark made a mistake.”
While lack of lighting puts maternal and surgery patients at the biggest immediate risk, an unreliable energy source makes long-term treatments, such as kidney dialysis, untenable. As the burden of chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs) rises in the global south, the strain on poorly electrified facilities will increase.