YET MORE patients at Southmead Hospital have had their operations cancelled.

Surgical equipment, that is moved off-site for cleaning had not been returned quickly enough so about 100 operations had to be cancelled.

Currently the equipment is sent away to Frenchay and even as far away as Almondsbury for sterilisation.

The equipment has to be sent away for sterilisation, as a cleaning area was not included in the first phase of development at the new £430m site.

The sterile services department was previously housed on-site at Southmead Hospital in part of the building that is due to be demolished to make way for the next phase of the development.

Frenchay sterile services remained on site after the move as part of the plan to provide an interim solution.

Several options for the interim provision of sterile services were looked at ahead of the move and the option of Frenchay and Almondsbury was found to be the most cost-effective.

A spokesman for the North Bristol NHS Trust, said: “It was planned that the sterile services department would relocate to Almondsbury for an 18-month period while the next phase of works on the Southmead Hospital site was completed.

“Next autumn sterile services currently provided at Almondsbury and Frenchay will move into a new home in the second phase of the Brunel building.

“There were some issues when the service first moved but it is now working effectively and there are very few occasions when sterile services are unable to provide all of the equipment that has been requested.

“We only reschedule operations as a last resort and would like to apologise to those patients affected for the inevitable inconvenience this has caused.”

They added that only a relatively small (94 out of 4,657) operations in May, June and July had to be rescheduled for this reason.