Blocked sink reason behind the part-closure of A&E department

A sink blockage caused by an “unknown substance” lay behind the part-closure of Shrewsbury’s A&E department early this summer, a report reveals.

Trust Chief Operating Officer Nigel Lee writes that the smell spread from a patient examination cubicle to outpatient areas at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, causing a “very unpleasant environment”.

Patients were, at the time, advised to go to Telford’s Princess Royal Hospital instead.

Mr Lee’s report, prepared for the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust board, details the organisation’s emergency preparedness and response processes. 

“The trust has a mature suite of plans to deal with major incidents and business continuity issues,” he writes.

“These conform to the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act and current NHS-wide guidance.”

His paper reports on training and testing in line with the plans, and summarises “instances in which the trust has had to respond to extraordinary circumstances.

“The primary focus of 2020-21 has been the continued response to the coronavirus pandemic, which NHS England declared as a ‘level four’ national incident in January 2020,” Mr Lee writes.

“Incident co-ordination centres have been operating locally, regionally and nationally from the outset, with command, control, co-ordination and communication arrangements in place to ensure the response to the pandemic is co-ordinated.

“As well as supporting the level four Covid-19 response, SaTH has also responded to a number of incidents concurrently. Post-incident debriefs have taken place and post-incident reports have been written with clear recommendations.”

One of these was the emergency department part-closure of May 24, he writes.

“Due to an unknown substance that had been put down one of the sinks in one of the majors cubicles, a sink was blocked along with the sluice in the dirty utility.”

“Majors” are patients with serious conditions who are likely to need admission.

“The smell had spread to outpatient areas and was causing a very unpleasant environment for staff and patients,” Mr Lee writes.

“Internal escalation plans were activated and an ambulance divert was initiated until the issue was resolved.”

That incident was the second of three detailed in Mr Lee’s report. The first was in November 2020, he writes, when the facilities team received reports of issues around the handling and infectious clinical waste.

“Working with the estates team, a number of mitigating actions have been taken, including publication of a standard operating procedure for Covid-19 waste,” Mr Lee writes.

On May 30 this year an early-morning “routine generator test” revealed some equipment was overheating, which “led to outages of key clinical systems along with the VOIP telephony system”.

SaTH’s board will discuss Mr Lee’s report on Thursday, October 7.