Hospitals, home care patients, and the pharmaceutical sector face dangerous and costly consequences as blackouts persist.
Frequent and prolonged power outages in Iran are no longer just an inconvenience of darkened rooms and idle appliances—they have become a direct threat to life and health. From hospital intensive care units to patients receiving treatment at home, every blackout carries the potential for tragedy.
In one stark account published by the state-run Payam-e Ma website, an ICU nurse is seen holding a phone in one hand to update a doctor while trying to calm a distressed woman with the other. Suddenly, the power cuts out. A tense silence is broken by the blaring alarms of ventilators, perfusors, and mattress pumps. A young patient’s breathing machine shuts down, leaving the nurse to manually pump oxygen into his lungs with an ambubag. The emergency power kicks in 5 to 30 seconds later—seconds that feel like a lifetime.
Medical professionals say these outages cause double stress for staff, who must instantly respond to multiple critical alarms, all while managing the heightened anxiety of patients. “Every time the power goes out, all devices connected to patients shut off at once,” one ICU nurse explained. “We have to act immediately to keep them alive.”
The problem extends beyond hospital walls. Patients treated at home who rely on ventilators and suction devices face the same dangers. Their families are often forced to rent or repair damaged equipment at high cost, and in some cases, buy backup oxygen cylinders and battery-powered devices to prevent suffocation.
Operating rooms face particularly dangerous risks. One surgical nurse described a recent outage where the hospital’s backup power took 30 seconds to activate. “The surgical light went out, and we had to continue under the light of our cell phones,” he said. In delicate procedures such as heart, vascular, abdominal, or kidney transplant surgeries, where seconds are critical, this delay could prove fatal. In laparoscopy, the delay is even more pronounced—two minutes for the machine to reboot after the power returns.
The crisis is not limited to healthcare services. Iranian media previously reported that even hospitals with generators have faced generator failures under the strain of repeated blackouts.
The pharmaceutical sector has also been hit hard. Mohammad Abdohzadeh, chairman of the board of directors of the Pharmaceutical Industry Owners Syndicate, revealed that factories experience outages two to three days each week, cutting production capacity by 40%. “To compensate, we run generators, which consume 1,600 liters of diesel in an eight-hour shift—costing about 40 million tomans per day. Over three blackout days, that’s 120 million tomans a week,” he explained.
Laboratories, too, are feeling the strain. Mohammad Ali Boroumand of the Scientific Society of Pathology reported that power outages have damaged sensitive lab equipment, with repair costs exceeding 150 million tomans in some cases.
While the regime’s Health Minister Mohammad Reza Zafarghandi continues to deny that blackouts endanger patients, those on the frontlines paint a very different picture—one where every second without power can mean the difference between life and death.
