This story was first published at CPR news.
DENVER | Colorado’s largest hospital is beefing up protections around critical infrastructure after someone intentionally interfered with its oxygen supply.
The incident happened September 3 at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora, when someone gained access to its oxygen storage area and disrupted supply to the 831-bed hospital.
Staff quickly responded and moved affected patients to backup oxygen supplies, according to Kelli Christensen, UCHealth’s public and media relations director.
The issue was resolved a short time later and no patients were harmed.
CU Police, in partnership with other law enforcement agencies, has identified a suspect and is working to make an arrest. “Penalties for a crime like this can be very serious,” said Dan Weaver, UCHealth’s vice president of communications, on Friday.
The hospital treats hundreds of thousands of patients a year, according to the American Hospital Directory.
A spokesperson for the state’s hospital association said she had not heard of something like this happening before.
Oxygen is key to saving lives
It’s hard to overstate just how critical oxygen is to caring for hospital patients.
A key part of a hospital’s infrastructure, oxygen is used widely — as anyone who has spent any time in a hospital, or has watched many TV medical dramas, knows — for emergency and trauma care, surgery and anesthesia and much more.
At any given time in a big hospital, oxygen may be simultaneously piped into a heart transplant on the table in an operating room, to babies in the neonatal intensive care unit, and to patients breathing with the help of ventilators.
Patients quickly switched to backup supplies, hospital says
Nursing and facilities teams have procedures they follow anytime the hospital has a low-flow or low-pressure alarm on oxygen supplies, Weaver said. He noted it takes a while for oxygen pressure in the system to gradually drop.
The day of the incident, nurses followed those protocols and quickly moved patients who needed oxygen over to backup supplies, he said. Meanwhile, the facilities team switched the whole hospital to a backup oxygen source, later turning the main oxygen supply back on.
“So while the main supply was interrupted for a short time, patients still had oxygen through those backup options,” Weaver said.