Anxious families waiting for news about body parts being held at Bradford Hospitals are being urged to be patient.

The plea comes more than two months after a hotline was set up to field calls from people who had lost loved ones. Nearly 400 distressed relatives phoned up, but are yet to receive answers.

John Damman, director of corporate affairs at Bradford Hospitals NHS Trust, said he had hoped to provide information sooner but that he was constrained by national guidance.

He said: "A special body is being set up whose job is to co-ordinate what is going on nationally. We have been instructed not to relay information back to callers and are not in a position to be able to say whether we have got any organs or tissues.

"We've had a fairly large number of callers who say they can't sleep. They are very distressed and we have dealt with this sensitively. The hospital is desperate to relay definite information back to parents."

The hotline was set up after a Government report revealed 200 body parts, including organs and still births, were being retained at Bradford Hospitals. The figure was disclosed as part of a nationwide audit following the organs retention scandal at Liverpool's Alder Hey Hospital which saw parents holding multiple funerals for their children.

Mr Damman stressed that the situation in Bradford was completely different from Alder Hey, but that they had had to run rigorous checks.

He said: "We have to go through all our records going back to the 1950s to be absolutely certain of having retained any organs or tissues from individuals.

"We have carried out a physical search of every room and every department of the trust, even in hospitals which have been closed in the last 20 years, and the university. We won't know in some instances whether an organ or tissue has been sent to a national collection. And coroner's cases are not just done here but in other hospitals by our doctors. It's a very complicated process."

He added that if a parent had been particularly distressed, staff had tried to give out information to the best of their knowledge.

But one Bradford parent, whose baby daughter died of a rare virus nine years ago, described the handling of the situation as "appalling".

She said families were originally told to expect answers within three weeks and that promises of information had not been met.

She said: "We've completely lost confidence in the trust. They must know who the people are and should be telling us the truth.

"We are talking years ago, but it brings the whole thing back. We've struggled to come to terms and cope with it, then we find out that not only is there a query, but nobody is prepared to tell us what happened."