Doctors who own up to their mistakes could avoid being suspended or taken to court under an NHS safety drive.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt will tomorrow announce a package of proposals to encourage medical staff to be more honest about reporting errors.
In addition, there are plans to recruit hundreds of experts to review all NHS patient deaths to see if any were avoidable – a measure first suggested 11 years ago in response to serial killer GP Harold Shipman.
There is now widespread evidence that medical staff are still too scared to flag up poor care, despite repeated attempts by ministers to open up the NHS’s culture of secrecy.
Tragic case: Joshua Titcombe, from Cumbria, died needlessly from sepsis in 2008 following errors by midwives at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust
A new ‘honesty’ league table, published today to coincide with the reforms, shows that half of all hospitals are failing to report mistakes or near misses.
And only yesterday, a separate report by Imperial College London said just 5 per cent of NHS errors are ever recorded, partly because staff fear repercussions.
The Government pledged to make the NHS more open after a damning inquiry into the Mid Staffs hospital scandal three years ago, where hundreds of patients died after they received poor care.
In a speech tomorrow, Mr Hunt will say that although ‘huge improvements’ have been made, there is still a ‘quick fix blame culture’.
He will warn that at least 150 hospital patients die needlessly every year – in part because staff are not learning from previous unreported errors.
Addressing the Patient Safety Global Action Summit in central London, he will say: ‘We need to unshackle ourselves from a quick fix blame culture.
‘It is a scandal that every week there are potentially 150 avoidable deaths in our hospitals, and it is up to us all to make the need for whistleblowing and secrecy a thing of the past as we reform the NHS and its values, and move from blaming to learning.
‘Today we take a step forward to building a new era of openness and the safest healthcare system in the world.’ Mr Hunt proposes that doctors and nurses who report their mistakes should be protected from being sued by a patient’s relatives or disciplined by their regulator.
This would enable their hospital to carry out a full investigation, and if it decides the error was a one-off – or not entirely the staff member’s fault – they would be cleared of blame. On the other hand, if doctors and nurses are found to have been careless or negligent they would no longer be protected from legal action or from disciplinary tribunals.
Mr Hunt’s other proposals include appointing up to 385 experienced doctors as medical examiners by 2018 to review all deaths to check for poor NHS care.
The experts would consider whether the death was avoidable or if any patterns were emerging in hospital departments, or under certain doctors.
Medical examiners were first proposed in 2005 by an inquiry into Shipman, a GP from Hyde, near Manchester, who killed as many as 250 of his patients.
Hospitals will also be told to estimate the number of excess deaths on wards each year, based on staff going back through medical notes.
The league table published by the Department of Health today shows that 110 out of 230 hospital and mental health trusts are failing to report mistakes properly.
This includes 78 trusts where there are ‘significant concerns’ about transparency, and 32 which are deemed even worse and to have a ‘poor reporting culture’.
The figures are based on how often trusts report mistakes as well as results from staff surveys on openness.
Health Secretary: Jeremy Hunt (pictured yesterday outside 10 Downing Street) will say tomorrow that there is still a 'quick fix blame culture'. Pictured right is James Titcombe, son of baby Joshua, who said it is 'clear we need to do something different'
James Titcombe, whose son Joshua died needlessly from sepsis in 2008 following blunders by midwives at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust, said: ‘Time and time again, we hear the promise that “lessons will be learned” following reports about systemic failures and individual stories of avoidable harm and loss in the NHS.
‘Yet, far too often, the same mistakes are repeated and meaningful learning and lasting change simply doesn’t happen.
‘If we are going to transform this, it’s clear that we need to do something different. Events at Mid Staffs and Morecambe Bay serve to highlight the devastating consequences of a culture that fails to learn.’
Mr Titcombe, who now advises the NHS on safety, added: ‘These announcements are about saying “never again”.
‘The measures announced are major steps that will help move the NHS towards the kind of true learning culture that other high-risk industries take for granted.’
Heidi Alexander, Labour’s health spokesman, said: ‘Labour is supportive of any measures that will improve safety and make the NHS more open to learning from mistakes.
'However, alongside measures to investigate harm there needs to be action to prevent harm from happening in the first place.’
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