VISITORS to Scotland’s new super hospital dialled 999 after they were left stranded more than 10 storeys off the ground in a broken lift.

The group of five tried repeatedly pressing the emergency button inside the stuck elevator at Glasgow's Queen Elizabeth University Hospital but there was no response.

The fire brigade appeared to be the first people to come to the aid of the passengers and it took almost an hour to set them free.

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It is understood a diabetic and someone visiting a close relative who was seriously ill were among those trapped.

Staff and a union representative suggested it is not the first time the lifts in the new hospital, which has been open for a little more than a year, have run into problems.

The incident occurred on Sunday evening around 6.30pm, just after the "protected meal time" when visiting is discouraged on a number of wards.

One of the trapped passengers said the lift rose to floor nine and then seemed to stumble and stop. After a few minutes, they said, someone pressed the emergency button to call help but there was no response. "We pressed it again and we pressed it again and nothing happened," they said. "There was no system to assist us. It was ghastly."

One of the passengers managed to find a signal on their phone and tried calling a ward in the hospital to alert staff to the problem. Another passenger dialled 999 and was told the fire brigade would attend.

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The fire-fighters arrived in around 10 minutes, and apparently removed the outer door of the lift which was stuck between floors 10 and 11. The passenger said it was hot inside and the fire brigade did manage to let some air in.

A lift engineer was contacted, but they were not on site and the passenger said it took 35 minutes for this expert to arrive. Eventually they were able to solve the problem and the lift "slowly creaked up" to the eleventh floor.

The passenger said: "It was absolutely horrendous. If someone right away had said 'we are on the case, we will get an engineer to you' and talked to us every five minutes telling us not to worry, that would have been ok. But the first thing that seemed to happen was the fire brigade."

The passenger added that a number of staff had commented that the lift had been stuck before on a number of occasions. After visiting hours, they said they had to take the stairs down 11 floors to exit the building. The following day, the passenger said people leaving the lift remarked that it had taken them 15 minutes to descend the hospital tower block. "My concern is patients have to use it as well... It is not the staff's fault. They have all been very good. It is the system surrounding the lift."

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A spokesman for Unison, a union which represents many staff in the hospital, said: "We are aware of periodic problems with these lifts and continue to raise them at a local level. Clearly the fact that members of the public have called the fire brigade to rescue them identifies a significant issue in the local emergency systems."

In a statement NHS GGC said: "There was an issue with a lift in the QEUH which stopped between floors on Sunday.

"One of the people in the lift called the Fire & Rescue Service and one of our lift engineers also attended.

"Hospital facilities staff are looking into what caused the lift to stop between floors and if there is an issue with the emergency response button.

"Hundreds of lift journeys are made in the hospital every day without incident and we apologise to those affected on Sunday."

An external provider looks after the lifts and is not based on the hospital site.