UK hospitals ordered to cut risk of drugs going wrongly into spinal fluid

In shortening the full (online) News article by Jane Feinmann to fit onto the page of our print issue (BMJ 2009;339:b5076, doi:10.1136/bmj.b5076), we inadvertently deleted an important paragraph. This deletion might have left readers of the print journal with a misleading impression about the safety alerts. We should have retained that paragraph, which clarified the role of the National Patient Safety Agency: “The deadlines [for compliance with safety alerts] were created by the NPSA External Reference Group on Safer Neuraxial Devices, which was set up under the chairmanship of Professor Toft after the publication of the critical select committee report, in collaboration with the National Patient Safety Agency.” The paragraph is present in the full version but not in the print version (or its pdf).