HEALTH officials in Darlington are working with the National Patient Safety Agency to introduce systems to keep the public safe.

Darlington Primary Care Trust said if mistakes were made the initiative should stop them happening again.

The town's 11 general practitioner practices are backing the scheme, which will ensure any errors are reported to the trust for investigation.

Under the terms of doctors' new contracts, GPs have also agreed to in-house investigations of at least six incidents a year in a big improvement to patient safety.

Staff have already undergone awareness training about the system and trust managers are to receive specialist root cause analysis training with the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA).

The Darlington trust's clinical governance manager, Sue Goulding, said Darlington was one of the first in the region to apply the system.

The trust will receive reports of incidents and will analyse them so important lessons can be learned and recommendations circulated throughout the health service.

Mrs Goulding said the system would encourage reporting of incidents because clinical staff would no longer fear their mistakes would automatically lose them their jobs.

But she said the culture change needed the full support of the public and a shift away from people wanting to sue the National Health Service.

The NPSA set up the reporting and learning system for health organisations in response to serious incidents such as the Bristol organ retention controversy.

Mrs Goulding said: "Everyone must accept that as humans we are all capable of making mistakes. If you are a hairdresser or a mechanic the impact is much less. But we must all understand that clinicians are human too and could make mistakes.

"The important thing is that we know about any mistakes so we can learn from them and put systems in place to stop them recurring."

She said experience showed that when incidents were analysed most of them were not down to one person but to a series of events, many of which started with the best intentions.

Mrs Goulding said: "More often than not it is a systems failure that starts a chain reaction that can end badly.

"The new system will enable us to monitor and highlight the lessons learned so what starts as a negative thing becomes something very positive."