HEALTH records for all hospital patients in Worcestershire are being moved out of the county to Birmingham, it has been revealed.

Records for patients treated at the county’s three main hospitals, including Worcestershire Royal in Worcester, will be stored in digital format, available at the touch of a button from a base in Erdington, north Birmingham.

At present, paper case notes have to be delivered to the hospital from a warehouse in Hampton Lovett, near Droitwich, by a porter.

John Rostill, chief executive of the Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “The service will be quick, efficient and safe. It will even be possible for clinicians on two different sites to look at the same patient’s records at the same time, which will reduce treatment delays.”

The trust has already introduced the system for X-rays, the results of which are now stored digitally.

But the decision has provoked anger from staff who look after the 600,000 patient records stored at the library.

The unit contains all the personal files on everyone ever treated at the Royal, Kidderminster Hospital and the Alexandra in Redditch.

Under the plans, the Droitwich Medical Records Library will close in February 2009 and the service will be taken over by a private company, Iron Mountain, from October.

The records and the 20 staff who work at the library will then be moved.

One staff member, who did not wish to be named, said the change meant an 88-mile-round trip and add two hours to her working day.

She also wants to work for the NHS, not a private firm.

She said: “We feel we have been treated shabbily. We will be boxed up and shipped out. We feel dehumanised and treated like commodities rather than people.”

She says they were only told about the move this month, although there had been rumours at Christmas.

John Thornbury, director of ICT at the trust, said jobs were safe in a letter dated Friday, August 8 and this has been confirmed by John Rostill who said staff who were unable to travel to the new site would be given help to find jobs elsewhere in the NHS.