Queen’s Speech

My Lords, I am grateful for your Lordships’ indulgence in permitting me to speak in the gap. CORESS is a private initiative that is shortly, I hope, to become a charity. It was originally conceived by a group of surgeons who are or have been aviators, and is modelled on a successful and well established body in the aviation industry. Its purpose is to receive entirely anonymous reports from surgeons of near misses in their surgical procedures where an accident has fortunately been avoided. The one condition is that there must be no litigation or criminal proceedings. If the condition is met, an advisory panel examines the report and issues its own comments on the case. These comments are then placed in the public domain and the anonymity—or, to use a word that is fortunately not yet in the English dictionary, disidentification—of the surgeon is preserved. This enables the reporter to share his experience with colleagues. CORESS is still in its early stages, but the feedback is that members of the surgical profession find these shared experiences to be of considerable value. I should mention that CORESS is complementary to the National Patient Safety Agency, the remit of which is to follow up incidents that usually involve litigation; so there is a fundamental difference between the two. I could not be present for the start of the debate because, as chairman of CORESS, I was hosting a seminar that brought together other near-miss bodies, representing such diverse activities as aviation, to which I have just referred, marine and civil engineering, and outdoor activities such as rock climbing and potholing. I suggest that surgery is a valuable addition to this near-miss culture, for want of a better word, and I hope that the Minister will welcome this initiative when he replies.