YORK Hospital is set to become one of the country's safest for patients after it won major national funding.

The hospital has joined forces with Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Trust and their partnership has won £165,000 from the Safer Patients Initiative, run by independent charity The Health Foundation.

The cash will be spent on investigating how the hospital's wards, its critical care areas, and its surgical operations - before, during and after - can be made safer and fewer medical mistakes made.

In each of these areas, the project will look at ways to improve infection control, manage drugs better, and boost communication between staff and patients.

Staff will come up with a series of ideas to make the hospital safer and carry out tests so they can be quickly put into practice.

Director of nursing Mike Proctor said: "It's really about trying things, it's about developing ideas that could improve patient safety and putting them rapidly into action. Change sometimes takes an awful long time to bring about. This is about the rapid testing of things.

"This will buy us time to give some more thought to these issues.

"Safety is a high priority for us anyway, but it's clear that there are things that happen in lots of different places that we could learn from and implement - as they could learn from us."

York and Calderdale are one of ten hospital partnerships that have been singled out to win the award in Britain.

They will get extra support from patient safety experts at the US-based Institute For Healthcare Improvement.

Research has suggested that about one in ten patients experiences unnecessary suffering because of mistakes which happen in hospital - costing the NHS huge amounts of cash every year.

Health Foundation chief executive Stephen Thornton said: "We're delighted that as of today York hospital will be part of the Safer Patients Initiative.

"We are impressed by the hospital's outstanding commitment to make the care it provides to patients the safest it can be.

"York Hospital will be part of a nationwide drive to make UK hospitals the safest in the world.

"Our SPI hospitals are pioneers of today and safety champions of tomorrow."

Hospital chief executive Jim Easton said: "Although current figures suggest that York Hospital has a good NHS record in terms of safety, we believe that the excellent hospitals of the future will have made significant further strides in this area, and we want to be part of the leading group."