Hospital staff will help patients prepare to be re-located as work begins on the Hadfield Building at the Northern General Hospital
Hospital staff will help patients prepare to be re-located as work begins on Hadfield Building at the Northern General Hospital.
Building work is due to start on the Hadfield Building at the Northern General Hospital next week. The work is necessary following some exploratory inspection work on the walls of the building which prompted Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation to seek advice from South Yorkshire Fire Service about fire prevention measures inside the walls.
Kirsten Major, Interim Chief Executive, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. explained: "We carried out some exploratory inspection work on the building walls and this provided an opportunity for us to seek the advice of the Fire Service, who we work closely with as a matter of course. Following our request the Fire Service has advised that we need to do further work on prevention measures within the walls and that this work should be undertaken as a priority.
This advice is not due to any new sudden increased risk of a fire starting in the building it is more concerned with fire protection measures inside the walls which would limit the impact of a fire.
We do already have a number of fire prevention and protection measures in place including trained fire safety teams, fire wardens and sophisticated automated smoke detectors and alarms in the Hadfield building.
The work will inevitably cause a level of disruption which cannot be avoided and advice from the Fire Service is that patients and staff need to be re-located.
We take any advice from the Fire Service very seriously and so have planned to start the work at the earliest opportunity.Clearly reducing the facilities available for patient care for a period of time and also relocating patients, needs very careful planning and we will be ensuring patients and staff are informed and supported over the weekend as we begin to relocate them to other appropriate parts of the Trust.
During the period it will take to relocate patients we are also enhancing fire prevention and protection measures such as onsite trained fire safety officers, regular checks and we will continue to have support from the fire service. We feel this is important to provide additional reassurance for patients whilst we are in the process of relocating patients to other areas.”
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