Medical staff who don't report colleagues they suspect of poor practice could also be investigated, MPs said today.
They have a 'professional obligation' to blow the whistle on colleagues they have concerns about, according to a report.
Doctors and nurses who have taken action have 'sometimes been subject to suspension, dismissal or other sanctions' but the report called for inaction to be looked on as a 'serious breach'.
Investigation: There were 400 more deaths than expected at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust between 2005 and 2008
Chairman of the Commons' health committee, Stephen Dorrell, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'It absolutely has to be true that people working in the system have to be confident that if they deliver their professional obligations to review the care going on around them their employment clearly can't be at risk.
'The great majority of care delivered within the health care system is to a high standard but there are too many examples where standards aren't being delivered that we would all want to see.
'We don't do ourselves any favours if we avert our eyes from that.'The report highlighted the case of Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, where there were at least 400 more deaths than expected between 2005 to 2008.
Time to act: MP Stephen Dorrell, chair of the Commons' health committee, said doctors must report colleagues for poor practice
Doctors 'whose practice was in itself blameless but who failed to act and raise concerns about colleagues' are now also under investigation by the General Medical Council (GMC).
Mr Dorrell pointed to the Bristol baby scandal, where poor care led to high death rates among heart surgery infants in the 1990s.
He said: 'The real scandal of what went on there was not that nobody knew, it was that everybody knew and nobody did anything about it.'
Prof Stephen Bolsin, the anaesthetist who eventually brought the scandal to light, was forced to leave the UK after being cast as a troublemaker.
Speaking from Australia, he told the Today programme that the original report into the death rate was rewritten by doctors and turned the blame on the anaesthetists who were raising concerns.
He said: 'It became a very untenable position for me and I had to leave the UK.
'I applied for three other jobs in other hospitals and wasn't successful and I heard indirectly that this was because of the problems I was perceived to have caused at Bristol.'
Mr Dorrell said regulatory bodies like the GMC and the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) had to 'ensure that failure to act on it is regarded as a serious breach of professional obligation'.
'Serious breach': The Commons Health Committee said if medical staff fail to report poor practice by colleagues, they could also be investigated
He added: 'We do so because we believe that true professionalism involves intolerance of the second best, and because we believe it is this intolerance which is the best safeguard of the standards of care delivered to patients.
'At a time when there are significant concerns about standards of care in some parts of the health and social care system it is important that the professional regulators step up to the plate.
'Professionalism is about standards, and both public and professional opinion look to the regulatory bodies to give an uncompromising lead in this area.'
Chief executive of the medical council Niall Dickson said: 'There is a problem and has long been a problem that when an institution itself is failing the systems are not in place to enable staff to raise concerns and to do so in an open and transparent way.' dailymail.co.uk
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