If workers are told they are heading into temporary accommodation, most grin and bear it for a month or so.

But one department at a Brighton hospital has been housed in "temporary" accommodation for 35 years. Now, decades after their stop-gap base was set up, staff are finally moving into a permanent home.

Next week, a 12-strong team of medical secretaries at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, in Eastern Road, is moving into "permanent" offices three times bigger than the cramped space they have been working in.

Sheila Woodman, who has been a medical secretary at the hospital for 28 years, has heard numerous assurances she would one day be based in a permanent office.

She said: "At first we thought the move would only be for a few months and then we would move. All these years later it is finally happening. We heard many times we were moving but we're still here. We will practically have to shout in the new office because we will be so far away from each other!"

Medical secretaries provide the link between consultants, GPs, patients and their relatives. If an abnormal test result arrives they contact the consultant in charge of the patient and relay information.

They help organise patient admissions, keep doctors' diaries and fax urgent correspondence to other hospitals. They also have to make sense of doctors' notoriously illegible handwriting. The offices the medical secretaries have been calling their home for the past 35 years are above the Royal Sussex's main reception. The new offices will be in the former public health laboratory, on the Eastern Road site.