Pregnant women and their babies are at risk of dying at the Victoria Jubilee Hospital due to a defunct autoclave, a device used to sterilise equipment needed to perform operations, the Sunday Observer was told yesterday.

“The doctors are upset and people are at risk,” said consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist Dr Lloyd Goldson. “The problem is really the autoclave, which has not been working for six weeks.”

The equipment that is unable to be sterilised are used to perform critical procedures such as Caesarian sections.

According to Dr Goldson, operations are being cancelled daily, thereby increasing the risks to patients. The autoclave, he said, is old and in desperate need of maintenance or replacement.

“In the last six weeks we have cancelled about 60 cases,” said Dr Goldson, “On average we do about five of these cases per day. A 41-year-old woman was cancelled on four occasions, it was her first pregnancy and the baby died. It just does not get much worse than that.”

He said that although this may not have been the only factor causing the baby’s death, the cancellations played a huge role.

Dr Goldson described the situation as intolerable and said that the hospital’s administration needed to ‘wake up’.

He said that the equipment had to be taken to other hospitals to be sterilised. But due to the shortage of ambulances the equipment had to wait for up to three hours in some cases to be sterilised.

Yesterday, the hospital’s CEO could not be reached for comment.

Dr Goldson, obviously frustrated, added, “Today (yesterday) three cases were cancelled and we had an emergency C-Section to do. This was delayed by three hours.”

He said that the failure of the autoclave was intolerable, given that roughly 10,000 cases are done per year, and of this number, 12 per cent are C-Sections.

He also said that the hospital has been plagued by problems such as a severe shortage of nurses and faulty elevators, one of which trapped a patient for an hour yesterday.

“One of these elevators breaks down five times per day,” said Dr Goldson. “And whenever the elevators are not working, cases are cancelled.”