AN EVACUATION of more than 50 patients at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford will begin after a fire safety report found their lives were at risk.

Cladding, insufficient fire breaks between floors and vulnerable patients being unable to get out quick enough during a fire means 52 patients will be moved out of the Trauma Unit at the Headington hospital on Friday.

The move will come more than a week after Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (OUH) received recommendations from a report it had commissioned into fire safety across its buildings in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster.

The Oxford Mail has asked the trust for copies of the report, written by Bicester-based Trenton Fire, but full details have not yet been received.

Chairman of Healthwatch Oxfordshire, Professor George Smith, said the report needed to be made public immediately.

He added: “This is a public building and it affects everybody in the region, we need to see the full facts.

“The trust have paid for the report, they own it.”

Details into the type of cladding on the 15-year-old building were also requested, but the trust said the information could not be found in time of publication.

In the next three days, the trust will have to find 36 beds to move its trauma patients into as it prepares to move the entire unit, including specialised equipment, across two wards in the main hospital building.

Professor Smith said hunting around for beds was not a good enough emergency plan when the hospital is tested with an unexpected incident.

He said: “Closing hospital beds and with community hospitals under threat we are undermining the resilience of the system in its ability to cope with a big incident.

“We need to have beds in reserve for when something like this does happen.

“My concern is that this is not just any ward, there are real specialised teams here to help those that are in a real bad way from a horrible car accident.

“They need to make sure they have the pre-operative and post-operative care, specialised theatres in place, they can’t just be scattered around the hospital.”

Once patients have been safely moved to other areas of the hospital, the trust will start making changes to the building, which is expected to take a year.

Medical director of the trust Dr Tony Berendt said they were ‘disappointed’ to find structural flaws in the building but said the trust was doing all it could to make the building safe again.

He added: “What the report identifies is that there are measures to stop a fire spreading on a single floor but the measures we would want to have in place to stop a fire jumping from floor to floor are not there.

“Following what happened at Grenfell Tower we looked at how to get patients evacuated from the building and this now needs to be looked at in a completely different light, we just cannot get them out quick enough if a fire were to happen.

“Keeping patients in the unit while we fix the problem is not a possibility for us.”

Between now and Friday, temporary measures have been put in place to ensure patient safety.

Dr Berendt added: “We will be training staff to undertake basic fire control measures so that they are not waiting for the fire service to arrive.

“We have an agreement with the fire service that if a fire did break out they would not just send one response vehicle but would send a whole fleet so they could tackle the fire.”

Three other buildings were identified by the trust as needing further examination following its fire safety assessments.

These included offices used by Oxford University staff at the John Radcliffe and the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism and the Pet Crick Building on the Churchill site.

There is no requirement to provide additional fire safety measures for the two buildings on the Churchill site.

The office areas at the John Radcliffe will require new cladding to be put on the roof, but they have been deemed relatively low risk and remain safe for workers to continue occupying the space while the work is carried out.

Details of any review into fire safety at the Horton General Hospital in Banbury have not been released.

No other buildings at the Churchill and John Radcliffe have been deemed at-risk.