THERE are hundreds of cases of surgical negligence in this country each year regarding interventions involving the wrong organ – or even person – foreign objects remaining inside patients, feeding tubes being inserted into lungs, and the like.

We are also informed that, ingenuously assuming that anything like all such failings come to light, the odds of there happening in any particular instance are so many thousand to one, which is cold comfort for the victims or, where applicable, the bereaved. Can the whole team in a given theatre be so incompetent, apathetic, tired, intoxicated or whatever so as not to notice such oversights?

When such errors occur, they should be castigated with the full force of the criminal law – not left to feeble disciplinary measures nor protracted, highly frustrating and often foredoomed civil action – with penalties far more stringent than the ones meted out to those negligently inflicting equivalent suffering in a non-professional capacity.

Can one imagine, for example, many careless or reckless motorists getting off scot-free after causing comparable injury, let alone death?

Finally, I note in the Oxford Mail (May 11) that “hospitals that give false information about death rates will face unlimited fines” and “ministers hope the new criminal offence will deter health chiefs from giving misleading mortality statistics as part of efforts to bring an end to a ‘cover -up culture’”.

Well, why was this not already a crime? Who will ultimately be forking out the dosh and to the detriment of whom, and should this not be a custodial matter?

Besides, as I know from very bitter personal experience, it will take a great deal more than this belated step to begin to eliminate whitewashes in the NHS.

DAVID DIMENT, Riverside Court, Oxford