"wendesday 21st around 11.30 pm"

Thank you for taking the trouble to post your feedback about our A&E service. It is really disappointing to read such negative feedback, and the situation you have described is extremely alarming. Not only would it constitute a breach of patient confidentiality but would cast an extremely poor light on the professionalism of staff behaving in a totally inappropriate and unacceptable way. If there had been a query regarding an X-ray, our staff would be expected to go to an viewing room to look at the images; this viewing room is behind closed doors with no public access. From the information you have provided, our radiology manager has checked the patients who had an X-ray on the days you mentioned and cannot find evidence of a mix up having taken place. We have strict processes in place to help prevent such errors occurring. If a mix up did take place, however, it would be logged on our incident reporting system and this would be followed by a thorough investigation. We have checked out incident reporting system and there is nothing logged. If a mistake had been identified where the wrong images were recorded against the wrong patient, then clearly we would delete those images off the system as soon as possible otherwise they might wrongly be used to treat a patient. There would still be a clear audit trail in our system. However, deleting X-ray images cannot be done by nurses or doctors. The process for deleting an image, if it were deemed necessary, would require a radiographer to complete a form for the attention of the radiology manager to authorise. We take your comments very seriously and would urge you to get in touch with our Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) on free phone 0800 073 0510 so that we can investigate further. Alternatively, contact A&E matron Kaye Sheppard, via the hospital switchboard (01384) 456111, who would be happy to meet with you.