Best practice at Royal Marsden

Organisations that deal with other people's emergencies also have the skills to deal with their own. The Royal Marsden Hospital in London, one of the top cancer treatment facilities in the country, which suffered a serious fire on January 2nd demonstrated just the sort of crisis management that gives confidence to the general public.

Not only did they arrange for all patients affected to be cared from at the Brompton hospital nearby, they completed operations even as the fire was taking hold, no one was injured and they are already back in the business of seeing and treating patients.

Such a good result is not luck, but good planning, practice and resilient teamwork - a good example of how it should be done. What still remains is to determine how a fire was started - hospitals have a poor record of toaster fires, interestingly during the last fireman's strike toaster use was banned in most hospitals with positive results. But a toaster at the Royal Marsden, surely not .