NHS Forth Valley: Plans in place for power cuts which could affect medical equipment in homes

Fiona Collie, Falkirk Council’s representative on NHS Forth Valley board, said that she was aware of concern among some constituents about the possibility of power cuts in the winter ahead. When the board met this week, she asked what plans were in place to support people with complex medical conditions who are reliant on electronic equipment.

Patricia Cassidy, chief officer of Falkirk’s health and social care partnership, said the complex care teams have been talking to patients and their families individually about the kind of risk they are facing. There are 66 adults and a similar number of children looked after by the complex care team and Ms Cassidy said that a recent review of the service has seen an increase in staffing ratios to make sure they were well supported.

In light of the ongoing energy crisis the complex care team are also working with Falkirk Council’s benefits advice team. They are training nursing staff to make sure that patients and their families are receiving all of the benefits they are entitled to help them with increasing costs of energy in particular.

Ms Cassidy told the board that is happening while there are national discussions about what kind of support they will get with energy bills, to help them stay in their own homes.

Dr Graham Foster, head of public health in Forth Valley, acknowledged that “people are really worried” about the possibility of power shortages. He told the board that he was keen to give some reassurance “that it’s been big on our minds for at least the last year”.

Forth Valley had a “major reminder” of the impact on power cuts in recent years with Storm Arwen affecting the whole area and a gas outage in Falkirk that left hundreds without power for days. Dr Foster said that the area had “learned a lot” from these experiences and lots of work has been ongoing to improve resilience to bad weather, such as burying power lines and making it easier to access generators.

He said that national planning for major power cuts would mean any deliberate outages would last for around three hours at a time which we “should be able to get through” using battery back-up. “The idea is that by having small outages, three or four hours at a time, we can manage the problem without having any prolonged outages,” he said.

“We’re very aware of the situation and a lot of planning has gone into it nationally and the local resilience partnership has had had lots of training for our response to it. At the moment, there hasn’t been any need and it looks like there won’t be any need but it could happen and we are very aware of it.”