Patients evacuated in hospital fire

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The hospital's chief executive Dr Jane Collins said the incident, which is thought to have involved a gas cylinder, happened in the cardiac wing of the London children's hospital.

No-one was believed to have been injured.

Dr Collins said: "There was a fire in our cardiac block this morning that seemed to have led to an explosion, probably that of a medical gas cylinder.

"We obviously put our major incident plan into action very quickly and evacuated all of the patients and staff from that block. As far as I know at the moment there have been no injuries to any patients, parents or staff member.

"This incident may mean our cardiac wing may have to remain closed for a while."

Dr Collins said that some patients would have to be transferred to hospitals nearby including the Brompton Hospital and Guys Hospital, particularly those needing urgent operations.

She said there were around 30 or 40 patients in the cardiac wing at the time of the fire.

Dr Collins added: "Depending on how ill the children were they were evacuated to the appropriate place, so a child who was particularly unstable would have been moved to our intensive paediatric unit very quickly.

"There were some children who were due to have surgery this morning so they were already in the process of being anaesthetised. We have already woken these patients up because we want to make sure they are in a stable and safe situation. We are very concerned about the potential damage to the cardiac wing and the damage it could do to our cardiac programme."