Hospitals are urged to admit errors

Hospitals need to improve their recording of medical errors - which cause about 40,000 deaths a year in the NHS - researchers said today.

Independent research group Dr Foster found some NHS trusts were reporting zero levels of mistakes, a claim called "unlikely".

Writing in the British Medical Journal, the researchers called for hospitals to be encouraged to improve the recording of so- called "adverse events".

The government report An Organisation With A Memory, published in 2000, estimated that 10 per cent of hospital admissions led to some type of error - more than 850,000 mistakes a year.

The cost to the NHS was estimated at £2 billion a year in additional hospital stays alone.

Research in 2001 also estimated that mistakes in hospitals could be costing as many as 40,000 lives a year. Dr Foster said errors were most likely to occur in men, the elderly and emergency admissions.