A FORMER vicar’s family say they have been left distressed and upset after receiving a letter asking him to attend a hospital appointment - 20 years after he died.

The letter was sent to Canon Alec Goodrich, who was vicar of Aylesford between 1964 and 1979, by the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust.

It said an appointment had been made for him to see a consultant at Maidstone Hospital, despite the fact the clergyman died in January 1984.

Then, despite a complaint from the family, bungling administrators sent another letter to the late Mr Goodrich saying his appointment had been cancelled “due to unforeseen circumstances”.

Both letters were sent to Aylesford Vicarage and forwarded to Charles Goodrich, one of the late clergyman’s sons, who lives in Surrey.

Mr Goodrich, an aviation consultant who went to Maidstone Grammar School, wrote to the Trust to complain about the distress caused to the family.

He said: “They wrote back and told me it was an isolated incident and it was an administrative error. Amazingly they said it was my fault because I should have advised the Trust he had died.”

“I was very irritated and angry. I was so frustrated really that they did not take responsibility for it.”

In a letter to Mr Goodrich, Trust chief executive Rose Gibb said the error had been caused by the typing of one wrong number by the appointments’ clerk when making an appointment for another patient.

“If we had been aware of the death of your father that fact would have been marked on his records and this would have alerted us that we had made an error,” she said.

Mr Goodrich wrote back saying he would have accepted it as a plausible explanation had the letter cancelling the operation not been sent.

He added: “The implication also that your error could have been prevented had our family notified you of his death 20 years ago, and presumably every other NHS Trust in the UK, is quite extraordinary and offensive.”

Mrs Gibb has apologised to the family and said the second letter was a recurrence of the first error. She said Mr Goodrich’s father’s notes were now clearly marked to show he was deceased and she had been assured that the error could not happen again.

Mr Goodrich senior, who was also Rural Dean of Malling while vicar of Aylesford, died of prostate cancer in Gloucestershire. He was 69.

A spokesman for the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust said: “We are extremely sorry Mr Goodrich received these letters. It was a genuine mistake on our part and we have apologised to Mr Goodrich for any distress this may have caused.”

He said patient records, which were kept for a long time, were usually marked up to show if a patient had died, but that had not happened in this case.

“The records have now been updated to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” he added.