The opening of a £150m children’s hospital in Edinburgh has been delayed indefinitely the day before the first patients and equipment were expected to move in, after final inspections revealed safety concerns about its ventilation system.
The world-class Royal Hospital for Sick Children and Young People, in Little France on the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary campus, was intended to become fully operational next Tuesday when its children’s accident and emergency department opened.
On Thursday night the Scottish government confirmed that the decision to delay opening had been taken after “final safety checks which revealed that the ventilation system within the critical care department in the new hospital requires further work to meet national standards”.
Opposition parties expressed disbelief that the problem had not been identified sooner, while health unions complained that staff had not been informed of the abrupt change of plan before the news was released to the media.
The Scottish government’s health secretary, Jeane Freeman, speaking on the BBC Good Morning Scotland programme on Friday, explained that she had taken the decision to halt the opening completely after being made aware of the problem on Tuesday.
She said: “Because this was picked up so late I want to be sure that all other safety checks in the rest of the hospital are also conducted again independently.”
Freeman added that while the local health board, NHS Lothian, had been considering other options, such as a partial opening, she had decided that this “was too great a risk”.
The new children’s hospital shares the same design as the Queen Elizabeth University hospital in Glasgow, which has also experienced problems with ventilation systems that have been linked to infection outbreaks. Freeman previously told Holyrood that she had been given assurances there would not be similar problems at the Edinburgh site.
On Friday morning she said: “One of the things I need to find out is why was NHS Lothian so confident that the hospital was meeting all those standards when self-evidently in critical care it certainly wasn’t.”
Freeman, who emphasised that patient safety came first, said the phased move of other services was possible while the ventilation problems were fixed, but that was likely to take “months rather than weeks”. She said she hadalso instructed an audit of “every single aspect of safety checking” in order to identify what had gone wrong.
Freeman insisted that hospital staff had been told at the same time as the press release was issued, and that it had been important to ensure that families and the wider public were informed.
NHS Lothian’s chief executive, Tim Davison, apologised to patients, families and staff. He said: “Patient safety is paramount, and following the handover of the new hospital NHS Lothian has continued to monitor facilities at the new site to ensure all systems are operating to national standards.
“The air environment is extremely important and can help prevent the occurrence and spread of infection in patients who are already vulnerable.”
