Hospitals in Brighton which suffered a string of blunders have backed plans to force them to report medical mistakes to an NHS agency.

The new National Patient Safety Agency will investigate failures, errors and "near misses" which will then be published in air accident-style bulletins.

The independent agency, which will run from July, will also advise hospitals on how to avoid making the same mistakes in future.

Brighton Health Care NHS Trust, which runs three hospitals, said it already operated a culture of openness and learning about mistakes and would continue to do so but also backed the idea of the new agency.

It said all mistakes were taken extremely seriously and investigated as quickly as possible so any necessary changes in policy could be brought in.

Karen Parsley, director of nursing at the trust, said: "We take a positive view of this agency.

"It will not only help us to learn from any mistakes that have been made but we will also be able to get advice on what we can do to avoid similar mistakes being made again.

"At the moment, when we have an internal investigation of an error, we look at the mistake made and if we have to make changes in procedure we look at other departments to see if they can learn as well.

"Under the new system this could be applied to other hospitals throughout the country."

The Government has also pledged to eliminate cases of patients who die or are left paralysed by wrongly-administered spinal injections.

Earlier this year, Phillip Silsbury, 74, from Littlehampton, died after a painkilling injection was given in his vein instead of his spine during an operation at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton.

Other incidents included four-week-old Morgan Lamberth being given 60 times the recommended dosage of morphine by mistake while being treated at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Sick Children in Brighton.

A three-year-old boy was administered four times the recommended dosage of a antiviral drug at the same hospital.

In both cases the mistake was spotted quickly and the children were not affected.

This is the first time that reports of all failures, mistakes and near misses in the NHS will be streamlined through one body.

The new system has been modelled on the work of the Aviation Accidents Investigation Branch, which examines pilot errors and publishes regular reports into what happened.

Medical staff performing very high-risk procedures such as complex heart surgery or chemotherapy treatments may also be given airline-style safety briefings before each operation to ensure they are aware of potential mistakes.

The Government's Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson announced the proposal to set up the agency after a report last year showed one in ten hospital admissions results in a medical mistake of some sort.

There was also criticism that as errors were often investigated internally by individual hospitals, mistakes made in one place were not acted on and learned from by the rest of the country.

About 850,000 "adverse events" occur in the health service every year and the NHS pays out £400 million in clinical negligence compensation claims every year.

Prof Donaldson said: "The agency's system of identifying, recording, analysing and reporting adverse events will be at the heart of a shift to a more blame-free, open NHS where lessons are shared and learned.

"Over time, learning from the agency's unique database will be the way in which one patient's bad experience will help hundreds of others. It will make the NHS a safer place for everyone that uses it."