Two hospitals with RAAC ‘maintaining surveillance’ on dangerous concrete

Bosses of hospitals which contain a dangerous crumbling concrete have assured that ‘patient and staff safety is paramount’.

It has been confirmed that Salford Royal and Royal Oldham hospitals contain reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete – RAAC – in their roofing. They were two of seven hospital buildings across the North West – which was dubbed the worst region in the country for hospital roofs built with the collapse-prone concrete.

The building material is a lightweight, cheaper form of concrete that has been compared to a “chocolate Aero bar” and slammed as a “ticking time bomb” by one NHS chief executive.

When this was first reported back in October 2022, government plans only sought the removal of this concrete from all affected hospitals within 13 years.

One year on and the response from the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust – which runs the units in Oldham and Salford – remains the same.

They have stated that they are continuously monitoring the situation and removal of the concrete should take place before 2035. They did not confirm whether there are any immediate plans in place to resolve the issue.

 

 

Nadine Armitage, director of capital, estates and facilities at the NCA, said: “The planks in both Royal Oldham main building and Salford Royal Turnburg building have been inspected as part of a national requirement for all NHS Trusts to monitor and identify any issues and will be continually reviewed in line with national guidance from The Institution of Structural Engineers.

“Patient and colleague safety are paramount, and alongside ongoing inspections; the NCA has a rolling programme of additional surveillance to ensure any issues are found and fixed quickly until the planks have been replaced.”

Speaking to the Sunday Times back in 2022, the chief executive of Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King’s Lynn at the time, Caroline Shaw, shared how one roof on that site had 1,500 steel props holding up its roofs in 56 areas.

The former chief executive of The Christie Hospital previously said: “The roof is like a chocolate Aero bar. There are bubbles in the concrete and we’re checking it daily to make sure those bubbles don’t break and the roof doesn’t come down.

“It really is like a ticking time bomb. We quite often have to move services around to enable us to prop up the roof and I think for patients who are lying in bed and seeing these props it does feel quite unsafe and we have had patients complain about this.”

The seven hospitals in the North West with roofs which use RAAC are Aintree, Leighton, Blackpool, Countess of Chester, Royal Blackburn, the Royal Oldham, and Salford Royal. They were all flagged as having the concrete following the failure of two school roofs constructed using RAAC planks back in 2018.

This led to the Local Government Association (LGA) and the Department for Education (DfE) drawing attention to other schools across the country about the issue. The stated average lifespan of RAAC is approximately 30 years.

Following the collapse of the school roof, a national alert was raised in 2019, by buildings and engineering safety body CROSS (Collaborative Reporting For Safer Structures UK), to emphasise the potential risks. The material was used primarily in roof planks of some public buildings built between the mid-1960s and mid-1990s.

George Lythgoe, Local Democracy Reporter