Hospital declared a major incident

A COMBINATION of problems, including a sudden loss of power and blizzard weather conditions, came together to see Great Western Hospital, pictured, declare a major incident last month.

The power outage on Friday February 1 affected IT systems and caused MRI scans to be postponed and doctors and nurses had to resort to using paper records while the problems were fixed.

But councillors at Swindon Borough Council’s adult’s health, care and housing overview and scrutiny committee were told the outage didn’t affect operating theatres or delivery of babies.

Kevin McNamara, director of strategy and community services at the Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “That was the first question I was asked when we all got the call on Friday night and had to go back in - what about theatre?

“They run on an uninterrupted power supply which lasts quite a long time so they weren’t affected.”

But the combination of a power outage and heavy snow meant the hospital declared it a major incident.

Mr McNamara said: “We worked through the weekend to get it all sorted and ran through a resilience exercise. We found that the issue was probably one of two things so we made sure that both were fixed.”

He told the committee that the cause of the outage appeared to be a problem with generators that were meant to provide power when mains power was affected.

He added: “We came back the next Friday to hold another resilience exercise to make sure we were on top of the situation. That revealed another possible problem which we had resolved by the time we did a third resilience exercise the Wednesday after.”

After the meeting Mr McNamara said: “The resilience exercise we held on 8th February revealed a failure of a relay switch in another part of the hospital.

“However, it didn’t result in a power outage as a back-up switch kicked in which was replaced and tested over subsequent days to ensure the relay switch would work if it was called upon in future.”

Chairman of the committee Coun Fionuala Foley asked: “Was anyone injured or medically impacted as a result of the outage?”

Mr McNamara said: “To the best of my knowledge no, but we are still going through it. A full and extensive investigation with Serco and our PFI provider is ongoing which will help us understand all of the contributory factors that may have led to the outage.”