A HOSPITAL trust has apologised to patients after problems in retrieving patient records resulted in appointments being delayed or postponed.

County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust said it had apologised to a number of patients who had been affected by the problem.

Malcolm Gibb, 68, from Bear Park, Durham City, said his elderly mother, Monica, was kept waiting for more than an hour after her medical records went missing before an outpatient appointment at the University Hospital of North Durham.

He described the situation at the hospital as "absolute chaos" with prominent posters warning patients about medical record delays.

A spokesman for the trust - which runs Darlington Memorial Hospital, the University Hospital of North Durham and Bishop Auckland General Hospital - said changes in how clinical records are handled and tracked were introduced in the past few weeks.

This is in preparation for the 1,000-bed trust to move to an electronic clinical record management system later this year.

The move will involve more than a million sets of patients records.

Diane Murphy, clinical director of service transformation, said: "Regrettably, we have experienced some problems in the past two weeks with some paper records being unavailable in time for clinics and in some cases creating delays in meeting appointment times.

"We have been putting, and continue to put maximum effort in to resolve the issues and have begun to see improvements that we expect to be sustained over the next few weeks.

"We are keeping a track on those patients affected and are calling those patients whose appointments have been postponed to apologise and following that up by letter."

Mr Gibb said he realised there were problems when he arrived with his mother on Tuesday morning.

"There were notices all over the hospital saying we apologise for any inconvenience due to our records system," said Mr Gibb.

The 10.25am appointment was a follow-up to a cataract operation at Bishop Auckland General Hospital the previous week, but problems in tracking down Mrs Gibb's medical records meant that the doctor was unable to see the patient until 11.50am.

"They couldn't process her appointment so we had to wait until the doctors got some stuff faxed over from Bishop Auckland," said Mr Gibb, who was given a leaflet giving him details of how he could complain if he wished to.

"They need to let people know they have a problem," said Mr Gibb.