When critical infrastructure in a hospital fails, the consequences for patient care can be extremely serious. That’s why our service team leapt into action to support our client Sodexo Healthcare at Manchester Royal Infirmary, when some planned maintenance work on the Trust’s electricity substation impacted the isolators operating in the Aseptics Suite.

The suite houses four isolators used in the preparation of cytotoxic drugs for cancer patients. When pharmacy staff switched them back on after one night of maintenance works, they discovered two had been affected by the planned black start (the process of restoring the electricity supply). By chance, Envair’s Paul Murray was due to be on site the next day to fit a new triple sensor board to one of the isolators and after having checked that we had the right parts in stock, completed the repairs to the power supplies in the same visit, thus keeping downtime and costs to a minimum.

Later in the same week, following another overnight switch off, two other negative pressure isolators experienced the same power issues. This meant the department was down to only one working isolator, with a large volume of chemotherapy drugs due to go into production.

Response within hours

Envair were made aware of the issue at 10.20am, when Service Administrator Olivia Woods took the call from Sodexo to ask about parts and engineer availability. She took 15 minutes to identify that the spare parts were in stock and that a service engineer could be despatched. Steve Shorrock got to site an hour and half later, and by 1pm, the isolators were all back up and running and chemotherapy production was able to start again.