§ Tim LoughtonTo ask the Secretary of State for Health how many serious untoward incidents were recorded in each hospital trust last year. [100550]
§ Mr. HuttonThe Department does not collect this information from individual trusts.
The Government have established the National Patient Safety Agency to improve the safety of national health service patient care by promoting an open and fair culture and by introducing a national reporting and learning system for adverse events. The system will be rolled out across the NHS from summer 2003. This will, in time, enable us to understand the true nature and extent of medical errors in the NHS and take action to prevent them being repeated. The reporting system will be anonymous and confidential in order to encourage local reporting and thereby enable the NHS to learn as much as possible to make systems safer. It will not therefore identify the number of incidents occurring in an individual hospital.