NHS chiefs look to Dounreay for tips on making hospitals safer

NHS bosses are taking lessons from the Dounreay nuclear plant on how to make hospitals safer for patients.

The Scottish Patient Safety Programme spent two days at Dounreay to discover how the site has improved its safety performance in recent years and to see if procedures can be transferred to the health service.

The Caithness plant, which is being decommissioned at a cost of £2.6 billion, has gone from being one of the poorest performing nuclear sites in the UK when it was taken over in 2005 by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, to one of the best.

The number of people being hurt while dismantling the redundant nuclear site has reduced ten-fold and accidents during the clean-out are at their lowest level since records began.

This is despite five times as many workers entering some of the most hazardous areas.