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Air conditioning at Chicago's Weiss Memorial Hospital could take weeks to fix
Administrators at Chicago's Weiss Memorial Hospital spoke for the first time Wednesday after busted air conditioners forced patients to be transferred for their own safety.
It could be weeks until the hospital in the Uptown neighborhood admits patients again.
Imagine being at a hospital for medical care and the temperature inside soars to 92 degrees. That is exactly what happened to patients at Weiss Memorial Hospital, at 4646 N. Marine Dr. near Chicago's lakefront, on Monday.
The sweltering conditions reached the point where the hospital had to shut down inpatient care and evacuate 45 patients.
It got so hot at Weiss this week that every single patient in the facility had to be discharged or moved to their sister hospital, West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park.
Andrea Saviozzi, executive director of nursing and clinical services at Weiss, said no patient care situations were affected — and the hospital was not evacuated in the middle of procedures such as surgical operations.
"We canceled our surgeries for the day," Saviozzi said. "We stopped admitted patients on Monday."
Since Weiss could not meet the mandated requirement of an inside temperature of 86 degrees or less, officials there had to shut down all inpatient care.
"We are an acute care hospital, so we have an intensive care unit. We have an operating room, general medical floor, an inpatient psych unit — so we have all different types," Saviozzi said. "Our population generally is more older population."
HVAC crews have been working nonstop to try to repair the cooling system at Weiss Memorial Hospital, which officials said should have been replaced decades ago.
"This whole repair is going to cost us somewhere in the quarter of a million dollar range — money that we really, a safety net hospital, usually doesn't really have," said Weiss chief executive officer Dr. Monoj Pressad.
Pressad said the hospital that Weiss is losing several million more dollars a day from not being able to bill for patient care, and that the repairs will be temporary — because the hospital needs a complete overhaul with an entire new HVAC system.
"They started springing leaks, they would trip — so that has to be repaired," Pressad said.
Pressad said a previous owner of Weiss kicked the can down the road when it came to maintenance and upgrades.
"We have people here who have been here for 30, 40 years. They have noticed it," he said. "It has been going on for a long time, and there wasn't much investment done in that area."
The hospital said only one of its four air conditioning systems is working. It still has cooling in the ER, and is still accepting people who walk into the ER — but those people are quickly being transferred to other facilities once they are stabilized.
Officials say it could take weeks to get the system back up and running, because it is difficult to find replacement parts.
