82 annual report 2010 3. C  ase shelved by mistake. CASE PROCESSING TIME. A regional state administration mistakenly shelved a child maintenance case which was to have been reopened according to a decision by the Department of Family Affairs. The state regional administration only became aware of the mistake when the citizen’s lawyer asked about the progress of the case. At the time when the Ombudsman made his statement, more than four years had passed since the Department of Family Affairs had decided that the case was to be reopened. The Ombudsman agreed with the regional state administration that the case processing error was deeply regrettable and recommended that the regional state administration speed up the processing of the case as much as possible. The Ombudsman also found it regrettable that the regional state administration had not replied to reminders from the citizen’s lawyer. In addition, the Ombudsman found that the regional state administration should have informed the citizen that the case processing was protracted. (Case No. 2010-1653-6005) 4. Hospital doctors’ duty to keep medical records A patient complained, among other things, that the National Board of Patients Complaints (the Board) had acquitted a doctor of responsibility for an inadequately kept medical record. The Board’s grounds for acquitting the doctor were that he was a hospital doctor and that it was a medical secretary who had entered the doctor’s dictated notes into the medical record. The Ombudsman opened a general case concerning the Board’s practice on hospital doctors’ duty to keep medical records. The Board stated that this practice had been followed for many years. The Ombudsman criticised the Board’s practice. He stressed that this practice was in contravention of the statutory duty for doctors to keep medical records. The Ombudsman recommended that the Board change its practice as soon as possible in order to bring it into accordance with the law. He also recommended that the Board together with the National Board of Health and the Ministry of Interior and Health inform the doctors of the change in practice and ask the hospitals to help provide their doctors with optimal conditions for observing the statutory duty to keep medical records.