77-Year-Old Dies After Power Outage During Heart Surgery
ENGLAND – A 77-year-old woman died during heart surgery at Scunthorpe General Hospital after a sudden 10-minute power outage interrupted the operation.
On August 13, the UK’s judiciary released its Prevention of Future Deaths report, revealing more details about the passing of Jean Dye. She was undergoing a Percutaneous Coronary Intervention — a simple, minimally invasive heart procedure used to open blocked arteries with the help of a small, permanent tube called a stent — to treat an existing heart condition on September 11, 2020.
Senior Coroner Paul Smith explained that doctors had only a short window of time to place the stent. During the procedure, an unexpected power cut occurred in the operating room and lasted about 10 minutes. The outage stopped the hospital from displaying the X-ray images needed for the surgery, preventing doctors from starting the stent placement until the power was restored. Although the procedure was eventually completed, Dye did not recover and was pronounced dead.
Smith stated that, on the balance of probabilities, Dye would have survived if the power cut had not occurred. The investigation revealed that the loss of electricity happened because the Emergency Power Off (EPO) circuit was triggered, which also disabled the hospital’s backup power. The exact reason remains unclear, but evidence confirmed that none of the three EPO buttons had been pressed.
He added that if staff had known the exact cause of the power failure and had been able to restart the system themselves — instead of waiting for an engineer to arrive and access a separate plant room — the delay would have been significantly shorter.
While it cannot be said with certainty that the additional delay determined the patient’s fate, Smith warned that similar situations in the future could have life-or-death consequences when every second matters. The report has been sent to the relevant health agencies, giving them until August 28 to respond and outline measures to prevent such incidents from happening again.