'Cover-up' claim after 999 service failed for five hours

SCOTLAND'S health minister has been accused of a "cover-up" in a row over a phone fault preventing 999 ambulance calls.

Emergency calls to Scotland's three dispatch centres had to be diverted to Northern Ireland and England when a glitch hit the telephone system on 21 July.

However, Nicola Sturgeon has been criticised by Labour after it was only discovered yesterday that no emergency calls were received by Scottish call centres for several hours.

Inverness staff were the first to encounter difficulties at around 1am.

The problem hit Edinburgh at 9:42am and then the Glasgow centre at 9:56am, where a team was able to receive a limited number of calls.

All the centres were fully operational again by 3:30pm.

Ms Sturgeon and the Scottish Ambulance Service insisted that all of the calls were diverted to Belfast and the north of England and that services operated as normal.

But Labour's Jackie Baillie, who said she was made aware of the system failure during a visit to Northern Ireland, demanded a probe into the failure.

Ms Baillie said: "I am shocked that all three of Scotland's ambulance dispatch centres went down at the same time.

"We need an urgent investigation to establish what went wrong and prevent it happening again.

"The reason that we have three centres is to build resilience into the system and this kind of major failure should not happen.

"It is reassuring to know that 999 calls continued to be handled from Northern Ireland and England, but we need to know what impact this had on response times.

"Perhaps the most shocking aspect of this situation is that we only found out about it by accident because I was on a visit to Belfast."Were the Scottish Government ever going to tell us about it?"

Ms Baillie went on to claim that the lives of patients could have been put at risk while the phone system was out of action.

She said: "Either the health secretary, Nicola Sturgeon, was not aware of what happened, in which case she is not doing her job properly, or she did know and deliberately colluded in a cover-up.

"This was a very serious failure that meant 999 calls could not be dealt with in Scotland.

"Patients could have been put at risk if ambulances took longer to reach them, yet the Scottish Government appears to have tried to keep it secret."

The health secretary denied there had been a cover-up and said that she would have revealed details of the fault if patients had been affected.

Ms Sturgeon said: "Ministers and Scottish Government officials were kept fully up to speed on the situation with the Scottish Ambulance Service phone lines last month.

"The contingency arrangements worked as planned, all calls were answered, there was no impact on patient care and the situation was resolved quickly.

"Had patient care been affected or if the situation had not been resolved quickly, we would, of course, have informed people."

A spokesman for the Scottish Ambulance Service said: "On Wednesday, 21 July all three of the Scottish Ambulance Service's Emergency Medical Dispatch Centres (EMDC) experienced difficulty receiving 999 calls as a result of a technical issue with BT's system.

"It is reassuring that contingency plans developed for such scenarios worked with the minimum disruption for patients.

"We have reviewed the incident with BT and they have agreed to an action plan to ensure that there is not a repeat of this type of fault.

"Contingency arrangements were successfully implemented and both Northern Ireland Ambulance Service and North West Ambulance Service passed call information to our EMDCs, who continued to dispatch ambulances to patients in need throughout the course of the BT failure."