THE "blame" culture in the NHS has to change to help uncover scandals such as the deaths at Gosport War Memorial Hospital, Jeremy Hunt has said.

The Health and Social Care Secretary said it was sometimes made too difficult for whistleblowers to raise concerns or for medics to admit mistakes, and the NHS had to be more open to acknowledging problems and learning from them.

His comments came as a leading health academic warned that situations similar to Gosport were "likely" to be happening elsewhere.

Mr Hunt said "there is a blame culture in a lot of the NHS" and, while it is changing, there is still "a long way to go".

"The basic problem is that if you are a doctor or a nurse and you see something going wrong - even if you are perhaps responsible for a mistake yourself - the most important thing, the thing that families want if they are bereaved or if they have a tragedy, is to know that the NHS isn't going to make that mistake again.

"We make it much too hard for doctors and nurses to do that - they are worried that there will be litigation, they will go up in front of the GMC or NMC, the reputation of their unit - in some places they are worried they might get fired, so we do have to tackle that blame culture and turn that into a learning culture."

A damning report revealed that more than 450 people had their lives shortened after being prescribed powerful painkillers at the Hampshire hospital.

An additional 200 patients were "probably" similarly given opioids between 1989 and 2000 without medical justification, according to the report published on Wednesday.

Mr Hunt told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "In an organisation of 1.4 million people, unfortunately you are going to get malpractice, you are going to get some people who do the wrong thing.

"You can never say that that will be totally eliminated but I do think we would find out about that much, much sooner these days with all the things we have put in place."

But Professor Sir Brian Jarman, head of the Dr Foster Unit at Imperial College London, warned the Gosport scandal could be repeated.