A LEADING North-East health trust has insisted that it is prepared for anything after a report showed that 90 per cent of hospitals were not equipped for a chemical incident.

Researchers who surveyed 227 accident and emergency departments in the UK said that in most cases the situation was unsafe.

A total of 76 per cent did not have satisfactory premises, 66 per cent could not adequately protect their staff, and 97 per cent could not decontaminate stretcher patients safely.

But project manager for the trauma division at Middlesbrough General Hospital, Sue Greaves, said it was one of the country's best prepared facilities. She said the hospital has an expert sitting on a national working party relating to chemical incidents.

Mrs Greaves said: "The ambulance service has a mobile decontamination unit which it has responsibility for and which it would take to the scene of any chemical incident."

There were also chemical incident suits available to the staff in the accident and emergency department, she said.

The national survey showed that only five departments - two per cent of the total - had sufficiently good premises, adequate staff protection and possessed at least three of the four available cyanide antidotes.

A and E consultant Grizelda George and colleagues from Horton Hospital, in Banbury, Oxfordshire, wrote in the Emergency Medicine Journal: "Our results suggest that more than 90 per cent of accident and emergency departments in the UK are currently unable to manage a serious chemical incident.

"It is self-evident that, in most cases, the current situation is unsafe."