The 11-minute interruption at Yulan Municipal Medical Centre on Friday left 32 beds in two wards without their usual piped oxygen supply, according to an audit released Sunday by Chengdu’s municipal health office. Staff switched patients to portable cylinders and moved 14 people to other wards; two operations were paused. The hospital said Monday that no deaths or lasting injuries had been reported.
Auditors found 23 scheduled checks logged as complete over seven months despite missing technician records. Entry-card data also showed that staff assigned to some checks had not entered the service area on the dates recorded. The report says the gaps covered equipment serving the hospital’s operating and recovery rooms.
What the audit uncovered
The failure began when a transfer assembly in the medical-gas system did not maintain pressure, the audit said. Nurses heard an alarm and fetched portable supplies while hospital teams shifted patients. The report found that an emergency backup arrangement worked, but staff had not been given a clear written procedure for moving patients between wards.
The review examined three years of maintenance spending and found 8.6 million yuan (about €1.1 million) in payments for servicing and replacement parts. Auditors could not match some charges to work records, and said the hospital had accepted invoices without confirming that all scheduled inspections were done. They did not accuse a named contractor of wrongdoing.
A check that exists only on paper cannot protect a patient when the pressure falls.
Dalton Dietrich, biomedical engineer
Hospital faces wider checks
Tara Hill, who led the audit team, said the false entries mattered because staff rely on scheduled tests to spot weaknesses before a system fails. “We found a pattern, not one missing signature,” she said. The report recommends a review of every medical-gas maintenance contract at the hospital and fresh tests of all its ward outlets.
Ganesh M. Sinha, the hospital’s deputy director for facilities, said the medical centre had suspended two facilities managers while it checks who approved the records. He said the hospital had replaced the failed assembly and arranged a second supplier to inspect the network. “Our first duty is to make sure the system is safe, then establish how these records passed review,” he said.
The municipal health office has ordered 18 public hospitals in Chengdu to submit oxygen-system inspection results by Friday. The order covers operating theatres, recovery rooms and wards; hospitals must also report any checks they cannot verify. Chengdu, a major city in Sichuan province in western China, relies on large public hospitals for specialist and emergency care.
The audit does not say whether the recording failures caused Friday’s fault. Hill said auditors had found no evidence that a patient was harmed, but warned that the outage exposed “a gap between the maintenance record and the equipment people depend on”. The health office said it would publish the results of the citywide checks next week.
