A 67-YEAR-OLD man endured months of anguish after a medical records mix-up led him to think he had developed cancer.

Paul Simmons said he suffered weeks of sleepless nights after finding a record of a procedure to remove a cancerous tumour from his bladder a decade ago.

The pensioner from Wootton, near Woodstock, who had undergone a number of surgeries around that time, suffered weeks of sleepless nights and was unsure if he had actually had the cancer operation while in hospital.

However, after months of worrying, Mr Simmons was eventually told the record, accessed through the Patient Services website, was wrong.

He is now demanding answers as to how such a serious procedure could have incorrectly been entered on his patient information, while hoping to highlight the potential inaccuracies of the system for other patients.

Mr Simmons, who lives alone, said: “It was a hell of a shock but it turns out the medical record are not reliable in any way.

“I spent hours at night unable to sleep, I was very worried.

“I thought that’s wrong they could do that without telling me.

“Online it says you should have two or three follow up checks, and I know I hadn’t had any further check-ups so I was worried about that.”

The apparent phantom procedure which his records said had occurred in 2008, is called a Transurethral Resection of Bladder Tumour (TURBT) and involves a scope being inserted through the urethra into the bladder to remove the tumour.

It is generally performed in hospitals as an outpatient procedure while the patient is anaesthetised.

Mr Simmons added: “My mother died from cancer, she died of a brain tumour in 1990, so it caused me a lot of stress.”

He immediately raised the matter with Woodstock Surgery which his GP said he would look into.

However, according to Mr Simmons, he was left waiting for weeks without an answer, until he eventually took it upon himself to write directly to Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) NHS Foundation Trust who had apparently carried out the tumour removal.

It was then surgeons confirmed to him that he had not in fact had the TURBT.

Hospitals will generally send information of procedures to GPs when the patient is discharged.

This information is then uploaded to the patients’ GP medical records by the surgery, some of which can then be accessed by the patient via the GP online service.

However, Mr Simmons it is not clear if it was the hospital who had sent the wrong information to his then GP surgery in 2008, or if it was the GPs who had mixed up the information.

Mr Simmons said: “Now I just want to know how it happened. There could be someone walking around out there with bladder cancer who doesn’t know about it.”

Since April 2015, patients have been able to see some of the information in their GP record through the GP online service.

It also allows patients to book appointments and order repeat prescriptions online, which was the reason Mr Simmons, who suffers from a number of chronic conditions, decided to sign up to the service

Practice manager at the Woodstock Surgery Susan Cavanagh said: “In all cases if a patient tells us of an inaccuracy on their online medical records the doctor will always look into it as a matter of urgency and seek to re-assure the patients of the true facts.”

Chief Nurse at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Sam Foster, said: “In response to Mr Simmons’ concerns, we wrote to him on 24 October to reassure him that, having reviewed all of the paper and electronic records that we have in the Trust, we can confirm that he did not have a Transurethral Resection of a Bladder Tumour (TURBT) procedure.

“We investigated Mr Simmons’ concerns as a matter of urgency when we were alerted to them by an email forwarded to us by Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group on 27 September.”

Patient Services have been contacted for comment.