East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust said Consort Healthcare, the private consortium that built the Royal Blackburn Hospital and its laundry, is to install a new steam generator.
By raising sufficient steam pressure, it was hoped that the laundry's vertical press - which should be capable of handling as many as 240,000 items of linen a week - will no longer grind to a halt, said the trust's press officer Janice Atkinson.
The trust's director of finance, information and planning, Stephen Brookfield, said that extra staff were being brought in to cope with the breakdowns, and stressed that wards were not short of clean linen. He said that if the cause was found to be steam pressure, it would be a problem for Consort to resolve and the trust would seek reimbursement for any additional cost incurred.
