A newly built £100m intensive care unit at an NHS hospital has been closed after it failed fire safety checks, leading to seriously ill patients being moved out. King’s College hospital in south London has had to shut the critical care unit after its own engineers and the London fire brigade identified problems that could potentially make it unsafe.
The trust has declared a critical incident over the closure, which has been prompted by fears that panels on the outside of the unit could make it easier for a fire to spread. The critical care unit only opened in April and is the biggest and most advanced facility of its kind in the NHS. It has played a key part in helping King’s manage an influx of seriously ill Covid-19 patients.
It holds up to 56 patients, and is understood to have had about 30 when the critical incident was declared. They are being moved to other parts of the hospital, including a critical care ward that had been closed for refurbishment. Concern about the potential fire risk has been so significant that King’s is understood to have had fire marshals on site in the unit around the clock during the pandemic. The hospital is undertaking urgent remedial work to remove the risk posed by the panels.
It is the latest fire safety problem to affect the unit. The planned opening of its first phase was postponed in November 2018 because of “issues with defective fire management within the unit”. At the time the trust said “defects in the critical care centre” were due to be fixed within a month.
King’s is one of the four big hospitals in London designated as major trauma centres for the capital because of their expertise in dealing with patients needing life-or-death care. Alongside St Mary’s in Paddington, the Royal London in Whitechapel and St George’s in Tooting, it played a key role in treating victims of several terrorist attacks and the Grenfell fire in 2017.
King’s has alerted other hospitals in south London to the incident. However, it is thought that none of the 30 critical care patients affected will be transferred to another hospital. Instead, hospitals such as St Thomas’ in Waterloo and Lewisham general hospital will take patients needing critical care who without the closure would have gone to King’s.
