NURSES working in the accident and emergency unit of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary have been put at risk for more than a year because of a faulty personal alarm system.
Frontline staff, who are frequently forced to deal with drunken and unruly patients, are furious after discovering the flaw.
Health chiefs today branded the situation "totally unacceptable" and said staff had been left "vulnerable to attacks".
When staff press the button an electronic display screen is supposed to tell security staff exactly where in the hospital they are.
However, when a nurse recently sounded her alarm accidentally, security guards were forced to ring round different wards trying to locate her.
It then emerged the system, which is managed by private contractor Haden, had been faulty for 15 months.
It comes just weeks after Haden - which is contracted to PFI operator Consort - was forced to apologise when a different set of panic alarms stopped working at the ERI and staff were not told.
The Evening News revealed last week that the Royal Infirmary, Scotland's busiest A&E unit, has escalating problems with violent and drunken patients, which peaked after Scotland's Euro 2008 defeat by Italy on November 17.
John Jack, director of facilities at NHS Lothian, said today: "It is totally unacceptable that our staff have been left vulnerable to attacks while this system was not working properly.
"The safety of our staff is a top priority for NHS Lothian and we are insisting that the system is operating to its full capacity as soon as possible."
One nurse, who asked to remain anonymous, said she had been stunned to discover the system was not working.
She said: "The security guards receive an audible signal but don't know where it has gone off. Even more worrying is that the system has been in this faulty state for over a year.
"The two guards I spoke to were as angry as I was. They told me they first reported the fault in August 2006 and they've continued to report it and tell their managers about the problem but Haden has never fixed it."
Unison, the public services union, said it was unacceptable.
Mick McGahey, the union's branch secretary for the Lothian University Hospitals Division, said: "A&E is an extremely dangerous area for anyone to work in. When a back-up system is in place we expect it to work, we're talking about people's lives here."
Consort was unable to confirm how long the system had been faulty, but promised to carry out a full investigation.
A spokeswoman said: "The system does work but does not work to its full potential.
"It identifies an area, for example accident and emergency, but does not identify a specific spot. This problem has only just been brought to our attention by our service provider [Haden], and we are taking this matter very, very seriously.
"We will be carrying out a full investigation, which our service provider will be contributing to. In the meantime we are working to have it rectified as soon as possible."
The full article contains 520 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
