MORE than $1 million has been spent patching up Royal Perth Hospital's 25-year-old cooling systems in the past six years.
A further $800,000 will be spent installing a second hand chiller and leasing another, according to a report in the Sunday Times.
The hospital is trying to avoid evacuating hundreds of patients because the machines, which run airconditioning, are failing.
The Sunday Times report said two of the hospital's three primary chillers had failed.
Health Department director-general Kim Snowball, if another one goes down "we're going to have to consider moving patients''.
At least $100,000 will be spent leasing one chiller from Melbourne if it is needed for the next two weeks as expected, according to industry sources, who said it would cost from $7000-$10,000 a day to lease, and thousands more to transport.
It was activated last Friday night. A second-hand chiller has come from Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital free, and after initially refusing to reveal installation costs, late yesterday the WA Health Department confirmed it would cost about $700,000 to set up.
"The total cost of all current repairs and replacements is not yet clear," a hospital spokesperson said.
To add to RPH's woes, the deadly bacteria, vancomycin-resistant enterococci, has been detected in patients in several wards of the Perth campus.
Senior clinicians, who revealed the $1 million repair bill, said the chiller problems were not only the fault of a "stingy State Government'' that did not want to spend on equipment, but also resulted from the "ineptitude of senior RPH management'' who did not fight for equipment when governments rejected their requests to get some.
In addition to activating the leased chiller on Friday night, the hospital confirmed that "one main chiller and the light load chiller are functioning and the airconditioning is operating as per normal."
