Major incident at hospital after power outage

The hospital was also hit by a power outage in February

A major incident was declared at a hospital while it was closed for several hours after a power outage.

Ambulances were put on "full divert" to other locations during the incident at East Surrey Hospital in Redhill on Friday afternoon.

The power came back on around 20:15 GMT and the hospital has fully reopened, including the emergency department.

A hospital spokesperson said staff are "continuing to closely monitor the situation to ensure safe services for our patients".

'Surgery cancelled'

The statement from Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust continued: "Please think before coming to the emergency department and use the right service so we can make sure people who are critically ill are seen as quickly as possible.

"Thank you to the public for using alternative services and thank you to all our teams and our system colleagues for their immense efforts in ensuring we were able to continue to provide for patients.”

The hospital cancelled some non-urgent operations and treatments during the afternoon.

The power outage follows a similar incident earlier this year when another failure impacted the hospital's intensive care and high dependency units.