SOUTHEND Hospital has apologised after asking a dementia sufferer to take part in a phone survey on its memory clinic.

The family of the 84-year-old woman from Southend, who have asked not to be named, made an official complaint to the hospital after she was called two days after attending the clinic designed to assess the memories of those living with dementia.

The automated call used personal information about the woman and urged her to rate its service. However, she became distressed believing it was a cold caller who knew her private details.

Her daughter said: “Mum has dementia and attended the memory clinic at the hospital. The people that go there are very vulnerable and easily upset.

“Then she got a phone call from the hospital which knew all about her history asking what she thought about the service.

“It asked her to push a buttons for different answers. She’s had prank calls and cold calls so she thought it was a prank call from someone who knew all about her. She was really upset. It’s not just my mum. There are 20-30 people who regularly attend the clinic who are in the same position. I would have thought they should have had to get permission to do this.”

The call was part of a “Friends and Family Test”, an NHS-wide initiative which uses an anonymous, set-question survey to gather feedback from patients who have recently visited the hospital. The data is then used to improve patient care.

Angela Allum, manager of the Silver Birch Carers Choices centre in Benfleet, a charity which provides day care for those living with dementia, said the system was too indiscriminate.

She said: “Quite frankly I am shocked by this. Procedures need to be put in place to filter such people out this kind of system. The hospital needs to be aware of who has a degree of dementia and exclude them because it would be very distressing for them.”

Denise Townsend, associate director of governance, apologised. She said: “We make every effort to identify patients for whom these telephone messages are not appropriate and remove them from the automated list, and apologise that this patient was inconvenienced in this way.

“The hospital uses an automated service to contact patients and ask the Friends and Family Test question “would you recommend Southend Hospital to friends and family”.

The telephone recording uses the number provided by the patient, states who the message is for and when that person attended the hospital.

Patients can opt-out of the follow-up calls by contacting the hospital’s patient advice and liaison service and providing their telephone number.