AN elderly Headless Cross couple have criticised the company in charge of telephone services at the Alexandra Hospital after struggling to contact each other for a week.

Alex Kelly, of Evesham Road, contacted the Advertiser after he had spent a week trying to call his wife on her bedside phone but encountered endless problems in a situation he branded "disgusting".

The 80-year-old said his wife Daphne, 60, had been admitted to Ward 16 on December 28 for a knee replacement operation and had only managed to contact him via her bedside phone once until she returned home last Wednesday.

And Mrs Kelly said she had not been the only patient suffering from a communication blackout.

"Lots of people were really and truly cut off from their families - it was a bit of a mess," she said.

"I didn't have any way of getting in touch with my husband unless I rang from the nurses' station."

She said an engineer had come to try to repair her telephone on New Year's Eve, but it remained unfixed, until she managed to make one call to her husband last Tuesday to tell him she was due home the following day.

Mr Kelly added: "It's a disgusting state of affairs - the NHS is paying for this service which doesn't work."

As the Advertiser went to press, nobody from the company which runs the Patientline bedside system was available for comment.