DOZENS of emails may not have ever been seen by a hospital’s complaints department following an IT glitch.

It is understood a new computer system failed after the two trusts running Colchester and Ipswich hospitals merged this summer.

Each hospital previously had their own complaints departments, known as the Patient and Advice Liaison Service (PALS).

The new East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust has admitted an IT glitch happened for two weeks in August “which impacted on the service”.

But one complainant, who the Gazette agreed not to name, said he was told by a PALS team member his email never reached the department.

He said: “She was quite quick to explain it so I felt like I wasn’t the first person to be told.”

The man, who lives in Colchester, had initially emailed PALS on August 8 to complain about delays in treatment.

He received an automatic email back the same day to acknowledge the email had arrived.

He said: “I hadn’t heard anything for a while so I rang them up. I got through to PALS, she freely told me they had no record of my complaint and that particular email inbox had had IT problems and had deleted everything since the merger.

“I was asked to resend my complaint, which means I’m back to square one.

Board papers show written complaints directed to Colchester PALS average around 60 a month. But while a trust spokesperson admitted there had been “some IT problems”, she insisted emails had not been lost.

However the trust did not explain where they had gone.

The spokesman said: “We are really sorry for the delay in responding to anyone who has been in contact with the Trust’s Patient Advice Liaison Service (PALS) team.

“There have been some IT problems which impacted on the service we were able to deliver for a period of about two weeks in August, but emails have not been lost.

“The issues were picked up quickly and people were proactively told about the problem.”

“A member of the PALS team has spoken with the person concerned today and we are hopeful the matter has now been resolved.”

However, the complainant added he could not see how the trust would know to tell people about the problem if emails had not arrived.

“If emails were deleted without being read or entered into a database, how could they possibly know who to contact? I don’t understand their logic.”

“It makes me wonder whether the investment at the hospital, in basic stuff such as email, is sufficient?

The trust spokesman added:“The auto-reply to emails sent to PALS was changed as quickly as possible.

"This outlined it was taking the team longer than usual to be able to see and respond to emails and encouraged people to phone them instead if the matter was urgent.

“Within the organisation there were various internal communications issued to staff and briefings with clinical colleagues.

“On this occasion we didn’t use our social media to inform the public, but should it ever happen again lessons would be learned and we would aim to keep the public updated via the trust’s social media channels too.”