Almost 25,000 hospital patients were the victims of reported medical errors last year, leading to death and serious injury in some cases.

The National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA), which revealed the figures, has issued new guidelines on patient wristbands after more than 2,900 errors were attributed to cases of mistaken identity.

Hospitals in England and Wales currently use a variety of bands, with colours or codes meaning different things. Some hospitals even use handwritten tags.

But the NPSA said these bands must now be standardised across the country in order to cut down on errors, which are thought to be widely under-reported in the NHS.

It has received reports of patients being placed in the wrong wards and given the wrong medication and blood. Some of these mistakes could have been lethal, the watchdog admitted.

Up to 30,000 patients are estimated to die every year due to avoidable medical errors. But the true scale of the problem is largely unknown due to a reluctance by NHS staff to report mistakes and near-misses.

A statement on the NPSA website said yesterday: “Between February 2006 and January 2007, the NPSA received 24,382 reports of patients being mismatched with their care.

“It is estimated that more than 2,900 of these related to wristbands and their use.”

The errors referred to by the Agency could include patients being given the wrong surgery, medication, or tests with potentially life-threatening consequences.

The NPSA said that no further breakdown of the figures for last year was available. The agency, designed to collect data on patient safety, was denounced last year as “dysfunctional” by the Public Accounts Committee, because it had no idea how many patients died each year as a result of medical errors.

It subsequently reported that 41,000 medication errors had been recorded between July 2005 to July 2006, which caused 36 deaths. A further 2,000 patients suffered “moderate or severe harm.”

In 2005, the National Audit Office reported that nearly one million errors or safety lapses had occurred in the previous year, causing 2,000 deaths. Half of the incidents could have been avoided if staff had learnt from past mistakes, the auditor said.

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