The charity Action Against Medical Accidents (AvMA) has said that three-quarters of NHS trusts – around 300 – are not complying with safety measures designed to protect patients and prevent fatal errors in hospitals.

BBC News reports that the trusts had all failed to comply with at least one safety notice designed to protect patient safety, despite the deadline passing.

The Department of Health (DoH) responded by saying that it expected all trusts to comply with safety notices, as well as recording and actioning them – and added that it would shortly be issuing all NHS organisations with ‘a formal reminder of their obligations to do this’.

However, chief executive of the AvMA, Peter Walsh, said that patients’ lives were being ‘put at risk’.

The national patient safety alert system enables guidance to be issued to NHS organisations by the National Patient Safety Agency, with deadlines set for when the guidance must be implemented.

However, data obtained by the AvMA under the Freedom of Information Act has revealed that 200 trusts have not complied with an alert issued five years previously – and 80 trusts have not revealed whether they have complied with 10 or more alerts issued.

University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust was found not to have revealed whether it had complied with 37 alerts. The trust told the BBC that three of the alerts were not ‘applicable’ – or could not be carried out for ‘technical reasons’.

Mr Walsh said that there was no system in place to ‘systematically monitor compliance and follow-up with the trusts’.

The BBC radio programme ‘File on 4’ has discovered evidence that Hinchingbrooke Healthcare NHS Trust – based in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire – failed to fully update its policy, after receiving advice from the National Patient Safety Agency about the correct procedure for testing the position of feeding tubes. Just one year later, Peter Cameron died when a nasal-gastric feeding tube was inserted into his lung instead of his stomach.

Hinchingbrooke Health Care NHS Trust declined to comment for legal reasons, but the programme highlighting the case will be repeated on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday, 21 February at 5pm.

The AvMA said that ‘robust compliance systems’ were lacking in many hospitals in England. The DoH said that, from April, the Care Quality Commission would be given ‘improved powers to monitor incidents and to ensure compliance with alerts’.

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