TODAY a Health Secretary appeared before the Commons to explain how a medical nightmare was allowed to unfold.

This time it was Alan Milburn at the despatch box, to reveal how he plans to prevent a repeat of the Bristol child heart scandal.

It is an event with which we are grimly familiar. Eerily similar statements were made about the Alder Hey organ retention horror and in the wake of GP Harold Shipman's murder spree. All very different scandals, but with one thing in common: doctors who thought they were superhuman.

Twenty-nine children died and another four were left brain damaged in botched operations by the surgeons at Bristol Royal Infirmary.

Their professional ineptitude is difficult to comprehend. The mounting death rate failed to dent their belief in their own infallibility. It was as if they had anaesthetised their consciences.

Families were shattered, heartbroken - and enraged. Their fury was directed not only at the conceit of the surgeons, but at the complicity of the medical establishment.

Doctors in other hospitals were so concerned at what was happening in Bristol, they dubbed its cardiac unit "the killing fields". And yet they allowed these surgeons to keep working for years.

Bristol, Alder Hey and Shipman have combined to damage our faith in the medical profession. But it was our unquestioning trust in doctors that led to the very culture of arrogance that allowed these scandals to develop.

Doctors are human. If they make a mistake, they should report it. Similarly, if doctors are concerned about a colleague's competence, they have a duty to report that too.

And that is beginning to happen. The National Patients' Safety Agency today said it had received a thousand reports of medical errors since being set up in the wake of the Bristol scandal. That sounds worrying, but it should reassure us that the medical profession is now putting lives, rather than doctors' reputations, first.

Updated: 10:34 Thursday, January 17, 2002