As a final year medical student in 2015 I was working in the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. I was surprised of the recurrent power shut downs called load shedding. I suspected a connection between load shedding and hospital admissions since I realized that some admitted patients had injuries that were obviously related to the lack of power (e.g. burns).

After several iterations, and a lot of work of Michael Schomaker as the statistician, three years later we finally published our results of the influence of load shedding on hospital admissions.

You can find the paper at Epidemiology or just contact me for a copy.

We were asked to make a video abstract for the journal.

The article has even been featured in the Saturday Star.