'Urgent change needed' after Jersey man's medical records lost on day of surgery

• Video report by Katya Fowler

Medical experts in Jersey say it is "unacceptable" and "urgent change" is needed after one man's records were lost on the day of his surgery.

A former reverend from Jersey was forced to wait two weeks for his eye surgery, after the hospital lost his medical notes. 

Philip Osborn was on the waiting list for cataract surgery for three years and finally made it to the top of the list for the procedure. 

When he arrived at the hospital, while in the waiting room, he received a call to say his surgery had been cancelled. 

Only after requesting a surgeon to speak to him in person, did he have a face-to-face response. 

"The surgeon came down to apologise and explain. He was very noticeably angry about it himself. It wasn't a matter of its last minute cancellation. He had through the system being trying to get by notes for over a week beforehand as he would normally do to plan the operation carefully."

Despite the £9.4 million that was promised to upgrade the Electronic patient record system 8 months ago, there's still no joined up network between GPs and the hospital.The government have apologised for any distress caused, and say that they take issues relating to patient records very seriously.

One local GP has admitted that the service needs to change and needs more funding. 

"It's not great, and it should not be happening. Not only is it frustrating, it's a clinical safety issue. We have to wait for those paper records to be posted to arrive, for that data to be transcribed by a human, which inevitably leads to some mistakes.

"And all of that, in our view, is a risk to patients. And considering the UK has had a system that for example translates pathology records electronically from one system to another for the best part of a quarter of a century. It's really not acceptable."

Luckily Philip was able to have the surgery yesterday (30 June), after his notes were found, and is now recovering.