String of permit breaches relating to handling of radioactive waste at four Yorkshire hospitals

A document supplied by the Environment Agency (EA) has detailed permit breaches at hospitals in Hull, York and Scarborough.

The EA issued warnings for all but one of the breaches, and said that all incidents either “had or had the potential to have no worse than a minor environmental impact”.

In June 2023, Hull Royal Infirmary was issued with warnings from the EA for a “missing bag of radioactive waste” which contained Tc-99m, an isotope commonly used as a diagnostics tool.

The hospital was also issued with warnings for failing to “label and dispose of a sample in accordance with procedures” in February 2023, and a waste store door being left open, which led to waste being removed by an untrained member of staff, in September 2023.

Hull’s Castle Hill Hospital breached its permits three times between February 2023 and April 2024 for incidents including staff not labelling waste as radioactive and disposing of waste “incorrectly”.

The EA also reported an incident at Castle Hill it described as: “Container collected was not empty and contained chemical. This was accidentally taken off site for return to supplier.”

A spokeswoman for NHS Humber Health Partnership, which runs the hospitals, said: “Each incident was investigated and corrective actions taken.

“Although the incidents were categorised as minor impact, no harm was caused. Each incident was taken seriously. We have carried out a review of our procedures and where appropriate, given additional staff training.”

In 2021,York Hospital was issued with a warning from the EA for what the agency described as a “spillage of radioactive material due to poor management systems”.

The EA recorded the breaches associated with this incident as category 3 or 4 – meaning they had a minor or no impact on the environment – and classified them as breaches relating to a failure to have sufficient management systems in place to ensure compliance with permits, or a breach of permit limits.

A spokesperson for York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (YSNFT) said: “In July 2021, we informed the EA of an error when two packages of I-123 were delivered on the same day at York Hospital, instead of a week apart. This meant the holdings for this isotope were above the permitted limit.

“To prevent this error reoccurring, we reviewed our purchasing process, and other teams are no longer involved with delivery of the isotopes. Instead, only nuclear medicine staff are now responsible for checking delivery dates by phone and then getting a confirmation email.”

I-123 is a radioactive isotope used in nuclear medicine imaging.

In 2018, Scarborough Hospital breached its accumulation limits for waste, with the EA adding: “there were no procedures in place to check the permit limits”.

A YSNFT spokesperson said: “In July 2021, we informed the EA of an error when two packages of I-123 were delivered on the same day at York Hospital, instead of a week apart. This meant that the holdings for this isotope were above the permitted limit.

“To prevent this error reoccurring, we reviewed our purchasing process, and other teams are no longer involved with delivery of the isotopes.

“In March 2018, following a review of the nuclear medicine workload at Scarborough Hospital, we informed the EA that when the radioactive product was delivered its activity was higher than the Trust was permitted to hold.

“At the time we asked that our limit be increased to allow the activity on site to be increased to cover this and several similar vials, to enable us to scan more patients in the same sessions. The request was accepted by the EA.”