Fire at Aberdeen's Disused Westholme Building, Woodend Hospital Site
A major blaze at the disused Westholme building on Aberdeen's Woodend Hospital site drew around 60 firefighters overnight. Patient services are unaffected, but NHS fire data shows why the disused parts of the healthcare estate matter.
INFIRISK Team·6 min read·
A large fire tore through the disused Westholme building on the Woodend Hospital site in Aberdeen on the night of Monday 13 April 2026, drawing around 60 firefighters at the height of the incident. Scottish Fire and Rescue Service crews worked through the night to stop the blaze spreading, and NHS Grampian has confirmed that patient services at Woodend Hospital itself are running as normal.
What actually burned at Westholme
The fire was not inside Woodend Hospital as such. It was in Westholme, a separate building on the wider Woodend site, used for many years as nursing accommodation and more recently as an office block. According to a statement from Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, crews were first called just before 21:50 BST, and the service mobilised nine appliances, a high-reach specialist vehicle and around 60 firefighters as the incident developed. The fire was contained to the first floor and parts of the ground floor, and there were no reported casualties.
Officers from Police Scotland were notified of the blaze around 22:20 BST and placed a cordon around the site, asking local residents to avoid the area. The force has said that enquiries to establish the full circumstances are at an early stage, and no cause has yet been identified. STV News reported that specialist investigators attended once the building was safe to enter on the Tuesday afternoon.
The operational hospital next door
Woodend Hospital is an NHS Grampian site on Eday Road in Aberdeen that provides orthopaedic, rehabilitation, stroke and a range of outpatient services. The Westholme building sits around 60 metres from the nearest operational hospital building, and NHS Grampian has confirmed that no patient areas were affected by the fire. The health board has asked patients to attend their scheduled appointments as normal, and says its own estates team is working with SFRS and Police Scotland on the investigation and make-safe work.
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Why disused NHS buildings are a particular fire risk
Cases like Westholme are a reminder that the NHS estate does not end at the boundary of the operational hospital. It extends to a significant stock of decommissioned wards, former nurses'' homes, disused offices and mothballed outbuildings. Analysis cited by Government Business estimates that around 9,000 fires occur each year in empty buildings across the UK, with roughly 25 per cent of insurer Aviva''s direct damage costs on commercial property linked to unoccupied premises. The National Fire Chiefs Council has put the wider potential economic cost of arson alone at between £5.5 billion and £11 billion a year.
Disused buildings are more vulnerable than occupied ones for several overlapping reasons. They often drop out of the routine inspection cycle, their detection and suppression systems may have been decommissioned or left unmaintained, fuel loads can accumulate unchecked, and there is rarely anyone on site to raise the alarm early. That combination lets a small ignition grow rapidly before the first 999 call, which is exactly the pattern Scottish Fire and Rescue Service described at Westholme, a large and well-developed fire by the time the first appliance arrived.
How common are fires across the wider NHS estate?
The NHS''s own returns make clear that fire is a persistent, not a marginal, risk. The Estates Returns Information Collection (ERIC), the mandatory annual return collected from all NHS trusts by NHS England Digital, shows that trusts in England reported 1,372 fires across their estates in 2022/23. That is an 18 per cent increase on 2021/22 and works out at close to four reported fires per day nationwide.
A separate Liberal Democrat analysis of Freedom of Information responses found 297 fires inside hospital buildings in 2022 across the 83 English trusts that replied, alongside a cluster of cases where fire alarms were logged as broken or out of service at individual sites. In the same year, a fire in a healthcare facility led to the first fire-related fatality in the sector since 2018/19, with 39 non-fatal casualties recorded and 30 of those occurring in fires that were logged as deliberate rather than accidental. Healthcare property commentators have linked the upward trend to the NHS''s well-documented backlog maintenance problem, with ageing electrical systems, cladding, ducting and temporary partitions appearing again and again in cause reports.
What Firecode and the 2005 Order expect of NHS estates
Fire safety on the NHS estate sits inside two overlapping frameworks. At national level, NHS England''s Health Technical Memorandum 05-03 (Firecode) sets out the operational expectations for fire safety management, fire safety training, maintenance of active and passive protection, and annual reporting. At statutory level, the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 places a general duty on the ''responsible person'' to carry out a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment, implement and maintain appropriate precautions, and review them when circumstances change.
Critically, the 2005 Order does not disappear because a building is empty. The responsible person duty persists as long as people might foreseeably access the premises, which almost always includes contractors, security staff, maintenance visitors and, in the real world, trespassers. A void NHS building therefore still needs a documented risk assessment that explicitly addresses deliberate ignition, the state of any remaining electrical supplies, residual combustible materials left behind after decommissioning, and the consequences of any loss of detection or suppression.
Practical steps for NHS estates teams managing disused buildings
Many of the measures that protect an operational ward also apply to a void NHS building, they just look different in execution. Estates teams running disused blocks like Westholme can reduce their exposure by tightening a handful of basics:
Keep a live register of every disused building on the trust estate and the named responsible person for each one.
Carry out a specific fire risk assessment that treats the building as void rather than dormant, and refresh it at set intervals.
Isolate redundant electrical and gas supplies wherever possible, and remove or lock down residual ignition sources.
Clear combustible materials, including old furniture, paperwork and clinical consumables, that have been left behind after decommissioning.
Maintain perimeter fencing, gates, security lighting and CCTV, and walk the boundary on a defined schedule.
Keep fire detection and alarm systems operational in any part of the building people still enter, and route any alarm to a monitored receiver.
Share up-to-date site plans with the local fire and rescue service so crews have accurate information before an incident, not during one.
Budget honestly for demolition, reuse or disposal. The longer a building sits empty, the greater the cumulative fire and security risk.
The Westholme fire appears, on the evidence so far, to have caused no harm to patients or staff, and Woodend Hospital is carrying on as normal. But the incident is a useful reminder that the boundary of an NHS site is not the front door of the operational hospital. Every empty block, every decommissioned office, every old nurses'' home is still part of the responsible person''s risk picture, and every one of them will eventually show up in the ERIC fire return.
