A MAJOR power cut effectively closed Southampton General Hospital yesterday with 75 scheduled operations cancelled and only the most critical going ahead.

Patients who were under the knife in operating theatres when the power failed at 10am were not adversely affected as an emergency power system kicked in immediately.

Only ambulances containing resuscitation patients - the most seriously life-threatening category - were accepted by Hampshire's biggest hospital.

All remaining 999 calls, of which there 17, were diverted to nearby medical centres with most going to the Royal Hampshire County Hospital at Winchester.

Practically all scheduled operations - both minor and major including some for heart surgery - were cancelled and surgeons only carried out urgent procedures on 999 resus patients and inpatients who fell critically ill on wards at the hospital.

Hundreds of routine outpatient appointments also had to be cancelled as essential equipment such as X-ray machines stood powerless.

Accident and emergency was open for urgent cases only but those with minor complaints were encouraged to go to their GPs or walk-in centres.

Power was eventually restored at 3pm but it will take weeks and possibly up to a month to catch up with an almost full day of lost work.

Some operations were put back on after power was restored but many patients had either gone home or had eaten - barring them from taking a general anaesthetic.

Now hospital bosses have vowed to reschedule all cancelled operations and outpatient appointments within the national target of one month for people who are notified of a cancellation on the day.

A spokesperson for the hospital said: "The power went off at about 10am but we obviously have backup generators so we can continue with high priority operations. Areas of the hospital such as theatres retained power.

"I can assure these people that they will definitely not be dumped to the bottom of the queue and hopefully they will get new appointments well within a month.

"The kind of scheduled operations that we had to cancel were appendectomies and heart surgery. Work carried on with things like physiotherapy as that type of thing doesn't need much power."

A spokeswoman for the Hampshire ambulance service said: "All patients were taken to the closest facility from their homes or to where the accident happened. We only took resus patients to the General."

Hospital engineers worked frantically to trace the source of the fault to an underground high voltage cable within the hospital's own internal electricity network. It was bypassed by engineers and will take up to two days to fix. The back up system could have worked for 200 hours without being refuelled.