NHS Grampian working alongside NHS Scotland Assure on decontamination unit remedial works

NHS Grampian is working alongside national partners NHS Scotland Assure as part of work to restore its Central Decontamination Unit – which sterilises and prepares surgical instruments – at Foresterhill.

As well as supporting the replacement and cleaning of ductwork to improve ventilation at the facility, the national body is leading on a sampling process to determine the source of a substance discovered on instruments during processing at the beginning of October. 

Alan Wilson, director of infrastructure and sustainability for NHS Grampian explained: “Works are ongoing at pace. We’re very grateful to our NHS Scotland Assure colleagues for being on hand to provide expert advice on a range of issues relating to the required remedial works.  

“This is a complex and comprehensive programme of works for a specialist facility which does a very important job. There are a lot of moving parts in the project – we have already installed new ductwork and insulation, and are upgrading the air handling unit, improving the supply of compressed air to our machines and replacing some areas of ceiling.  

“There is still a lot of work to do to repair and replace flooring, partitions and hatches, bring a purified water plant into service, install new washer disinfectors which have been ordered, put these through a validation process, rebalance air and water pressures, and service and complete validation processes on our sterilisers as well. All of this work will improve the resilience of the facility in the long term. 

“We also look forward to receiving sampling results from NHS Scotland Assure and then evaluating those in the coming weeks.” 

Approximately 683 elective surgical procedures and 702 dental outpatient appointments have been postponed since the Foresterhill CDU was taken out of use.  

Paul Bachoo, acute medical director for NHS Grampian explained: “The vast majority of surgical instruments which required re-processing have now been sterilised so this is allowing for more capacity in terms of washing the instruments theatre teams are using on a daily basis. This means we are now very gradually beginning to increase activity beyond our most urgent cases and will continue to scale up as decontamination capacity allows.” 

Explaining what has been done to mitigate the impact of this on patients, Paul added: “Throughout this process, we have continued to deliver the full range of clinical activity in our operating theatres, including c-sections, neuro surgery, major trauma, cardiac surgery, as well as emergency and urgent procedures. Some patients who were postponed have now been rescheduled. 

“Reviewing our waiting lists is a daily task to see if there are alternatives we can offer to patients, where appropriate, and book patients in for procedures based on their clinical priority. 

“We are very aware patients can become unwell while they are waiting so it’s an even bigger job than normal to really focus our activities on those who need us most. In the meantime, we have increased our capacity to support those awaiting outpatient appointments and that is beginning to have a positive impact on outpatient waiting times.  

“We’ve also been working to increase the number of people seen by National Treatment Centres where some additional capacity has been made available to us. And organisationally, we are looking at all potential alternative options to enable our staff to do the surgical work they so desperately wish to do.  

“We fully recognise the immense amount of work going on to keep theatre activity going across Grampian and to complete the necessary remedial works at Foresterhill as quickly as possible. We are very proud of our teams and we thank everybody for your patience during this testing time.”