Problem with ventilation system in West Wing Theatres at the John Radcliffe Hospital

Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is urgently reviewing patients due to have surgery in our hospitals as a result of a problem with the ventilation system in the Level 1 Theatres of the West Wing at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

Services across the Trust in all four of our hospitals (the John Radcliffe, Churchill and Horton General hospitals and the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre), are currently working to establish all planned and emergency patients who require urgent surgery, to enable us to risk assess and prioritise cases that may need operating on in an alternative location.

Staff in our Estates team and colleagues from Bouygues, who are responsible for the West Wing PFI building, are working hard to resolve the issue and to bring these theatres back into use. However, currently we do not know how long these theatres are going to be out of action.

Work was already ongoing in the main John Radcliffe operating theatres which means that four of those theatres are also currently out of action. Taken altogether this represents a significant loss of theatre capacity for the Trust.

The Trust is planning the best use of the capacity we have and the situation may change as we learn more about the problem. We are also talking to referring hospitals, our colleagues in clinical networks and South Central Ambulance Service about how they can help support us.

Sam Foster, Chief Nursing Officer said: "I would like to apologise to any patient whose operation has had to be postponed as a result of this problem with our theatres.

"We are working hard to make sure that all patients requiring urgent operations, including cancer patients, are able to continue to get the operations they need. Our Estates colleagues are working hard to get us back up to full capacity and we hope to be able to rearrange postponed operations as soon as possible."