Power outage residual issues

Update 5:30 p.m.: Systems affected by the power outage earlier today are back to normal.

The emergency department at Hamilton General Hospital is now receiving ambulances and is open to patients who require care. Procedures that were temporarily paused have also started to resume.

Once again, we are sincerely grateful to our staff and physicians for ensuring the ongoing delivery of safe care to our patients.

Posted 2:45 p.m.: At approximately 9:50 a.m. today, Hamilton Health Sciences’ Hamilton General Hospital (HGH) and Juravinski Hospital and Cancer Centre (JHCC) were affected by an external power outage. Alectra Utilities activated a secondary feed within 30 minutes to service the hospitals directly and mitigate further power interruptions.

While power has been restored in the area, there continue to be residual issues affecting some of our information technology systems, such as phone capabilities and access to internal platforms, across all of our sites. Our IT team is continuing to work to get all systems back to normal within the next few hours.

To ensure the ongoing safety of patients, we are coordinating with other hospital partners to temporarily redirect ambulances from the HGH emergency department, and have briefly paused a small number of non-urgent procedures scheduled for today. All other patient care is continuing.

We would like to thank all of our staff and physicians for swiftly and expertly implementing all of the required emergency protocols to manage this issue.