NHS Forth Valley chiefs say an urgent review is taking place into why a back-up generator failed to kick in straight away at Forth Valley Royal Hospital during a power cut at the height of Storm Eowyn.
At a meeting of the health board this week, chair Neena Mahal, stressed that no patients had come to harm during the incident and praised the staff for their “fantastic collective effort on Friday to keep our patients safe”.
Most appointments and procedures were cancelled for Friday and visitors were asked to stay away from the hospital in a bid to ensure people did not travel while the red weather warning was in place.
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In the afternoon, there was a power outage at FVRH and “there was a gap” before the back-up generator came on stream.
NHS Forth Valley chief executive, Ross McGuffie, said work is ongoing, working with facilities colleagues in SERCO, “to understand exactly what went wrong”.
“We have an early indication and we think we know exactly what it is but I don’t want to say that until its been 100 per cent confirmed with SERCO,” he said.
As well as the generator, there is also a battery back-up that lasts three to four hours.
Professor McGuffie said: “We created an incident team immediately on site to make sure that a safe service was able to be provided.”
He told the board that debrief meetings have been taking place this week, not just focusing on the outage but looking at the response to the situation across the organisation.
“It was a really significant challenge all day, just because of the weather and we want to make sure we get all the learning, so we can continue to build on our resilience plans for future winter periods.”
He also praised the community staff who worked in extremely challenging conditions to provide support to vulnerable people across Forth Valley who were affected by power outages throughout the weekend.
“I would just like to publicly thank all the staff for their incredible support on Friday and throughout the weekend, trying our best to provide a safe service throughout that time,” he said.
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