ArticleFrontiers in public health2025
When the lights went out: impacts of the April 2025 Iberian blackout on the Portuguese National Health Service sovereignty - a reflection on national defence, health sovereignty, risk, and infrastructural dependency.
Article in Frontiers in public health, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Perceptions and Needs of Primary Healthcare Providers Regarding Electricity Shortages and Blackouts: A Qualitative Study Using a Realistic Narrative Approach.International journal of public health · 2026Article
- Breathing in the Dark: Lessons from the April 2025 Blackout for Electricity-dependent Respiratory Patients.Open respiratory archivesArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
15 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The April 2025 blackout in the Iberian Peninsula severely disrupted The Portuguese National Health Service (NHS). It led to failures for over eight hours in power supply, digital systems, telecommunications, and inter-institutional coordination. Hospitals operated on limited generator capacity, essential medical equipment was triaged, and digital health records became inaccessible. Cold storage failures endangered temperature-sensitive medicines, while emergency communications and transport systems were severely compromised. This perspective article based on first-hand experience and grey literature proposes a first rapid analyses on the blackout as through the World Health Organization's Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management Framework. Advocating that health care resilience must then be acknowledged as a fundamental area of national security the article calls for regulatory improvement, decentralized energy solutions, digital redundancy, and integrated command structures linking health, civil protection, and defence sectors. It offers further insights into building anticipatory health systems capable of withstanding future complex disruptions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.