East Surrey Hospital: Urgent work to resolve power issues in high needs units

East Surrey Hospital declared a critical incident on Monday

A Surrey hospital plans to reopen its intensive care units on Wednesday following a critical incident.

A power cut in the intensive care and high dependency units at Redhill's East Surrey Hospital led to a critical incident being declared on Monday.

Dr Ed Cetti, chief medical director for Surrey and Sussex Healthcare Trust, said the critical incident has since been stood down.

He added "essential services remained open throughout" the incident.

Dr Cetti said: "I want to thank the public for their support as we worked to get the two units affected back up and running."

The NHS trust which runs Redhill's East Surrey Hospital said it remained open and urgent work was being done to solve issues throughout Tuesday.

A spokesperson said staff were "working exceptionally hard to provide care for those who need it most".

The spokesperson for Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust said: "Engineers are working to resolve the power issues in our intensive care and high dependency units and we intend to fully re-open both units tomorrow.

"In the meantime, we will continue to care for the patients on these units elsewhere in the hospital."

The hospital said patients on both units were safely evacuated on Monday and all families had been contacted to make them aware.

Analysis

By Mark Norman, BBC South East Health Correspondent

The first thing to say is, I am told the hospital is functioning as normal and "safely".

It is my understanding that any patients moved last night were kept on site and were not moved to other hospitals.

This type of incident creates what the NHS calls a "system response".

Other NHS organisations locally are liaising and making sure patient care is not compromised despite the technical difficulties.

For parts of Monday evening, some patients in ambulances will have been diverted to alternative A&E departments.

Now the trust is reinforcing the message that we should only use its A&E if it is indeed an emergency.

Those with a scheduled elective procedure on 21 February at East Surrey Hospital will be contacted with an update on appointments.

Former NHS director, Roy Lilley, told BBC Radio Surrey the "last place" hospitals would want a power outage would be in intensive care units.

He said: "It's very serious and very unusual.

"But it's the kind of thing hospitals do rehearse in emergency planning procedures, so they will know what to do, but it's not really what you want to do when you have a ward full of very sick people."

While the emergency department remained open to patients, the trust asked members of the public to consider alternatives for non-life threatening conditions.

This included treatment centres at Crawley, Caterham Dene, Horsham and East Grinstead.

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