Ryan McCord - Nichoals School of Environment
Assessing the Impacts of Sufficient and Reliable Power at Healthcare Facilities
Date: 10/24/2025 (Fri)
Time: 2:00pm- 3:00pm
Location: This seminar will be held both on-site and remotely. The on-site location will be: Grainger Hall 2102. It will also be held remotely via Zoom. (Please sign in to see the link.)
Organizer: Alejandro and Xingchen
Meeting Schedule: (Not currently open for scheduling. Please contact the seminar organizer listed above.)
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
2:00pm - Seminar Presentation (2:00pm to 3:00pm)
Additional Comments: Abstract: Health systems across sub-Saharan Africa face major challenges in delivering essential services due to shortages of staff, equipment, and reliable infrastructure. Electricity is among the most critical inputs. Without sufficient capacity power to run all equipment and services and power that is reliable, lighting, refrigeration, diagnostic equipment, and basic infection control can all be compromised. Despite this, more than one billion people globally still rely on facilities with no electricity or a highly unreliable supply. Using survey data, objectively measured sensor data, and monthly health system records from 303 hospitals and health centers across three provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we provide one of the first causal estimates of the relationship between having sufficient and reliable power on in-facility outcomes, specifically on mortality rates, patient utilization rates, and staffing. Using longitudinal targeted maximum likelihood estimation and two-way fixed effects models, we find that facilities with sufficient and reliable power (>22 hours of power/day) experience a 1.8 percentage point reduction in mortality (a 41% decline from control facilities, where average mortality rates are 4.5%). For a subset of facilities where we measure reliability over time, we find that during months where the uptime >91.7%, mortality rates are 1.6 percentage points lower, suggesting that having good reliability on average is important, but so too is sustaining that reliability. We also find a 17.3% increase in the number of outpatients and a 23% increase in the number of days nurses are scheduled to work each month. Our results underscore the critical role of sufficient and reliable electricity as a foundational health system input with large impacts on patient survival and service quality and demonstrate the potential of low-cost survey tools for capturing reliability in data-scarce settings. Stage: Fully drafted Type of feedback: All types of feedback welcome!