Safety agency wants to do more to engage clinicians, its head says

Anaesthetists will be the first specialists in England to have their own reporting system for patient safety incidents, the government's safety agency has announced.

The new system, which is due to be piloted next year, will work in tandem with the national reporting and learning system, which the National Patient Safety Agency set up in 2004 to capture mistakes and near misses involving patients in the NHS (BMJ 2004;328:481 doi: 10.1136/bmj.328.7438.481).

But questions have been raised about the usefulness and accuracy of the data captured by the current system and the speed …