The Department of Health must do more to end violence against NHS staff, a committee of MPs has said.

The public accounts committee said hospital trusts were failing to collect enough information about attacks on their staff.

Committee chairman Edward Leigh said he was shocked by the high levels of violence and aggression that nurses and other care workers were being subjected to.

Reported incidents of violence and aggression against NHS staff were described as "high and rising", with more than 95,000 reported incidents in 2001/02.

"It is shocking that nurses and other NHS staff, who care for others, should be subject to such high, and rising, levels of violence and aggression," said Leigh.

"The Department for Health and the NHS have improved awareness and reporting, and developed a range of measures to deter potential attackers.

"But this is not enough; I want to see them reverse the rising trend in the number of incidents."

Nurses and care workers are at a higher risk of violence and aggression than most other workers.

And the MPs warned that staff were suffering from injury and distress in the short term.

Over the longer term there were additional issues of stress, sickness absence, lower morale and productivity, as well as problems in retention and recruitment.

The committee concluded that while there has been progress in encouraging reporting, there remains a significant level of under-reporting.

Many NHS trusts are not using the standard definition set out by the department, and the information being collected does not differentiate between the types and severity of incidents.

These factors limit the department's understanding of the problem, and make it difficult to say how far the increase reflects an actual increase in incidents or to measure how well trusts individually and overall are performing, added the MPs.

They called for the next phase of the department's zero tolerance campaign to set out the reporting requirements which trusts should apply.

"The department must sort out its reporting arrangements so it knows how well trusts are performing," warned Leigh.

"And there is an urgent need to identify which approaches are most effective in preventing violence."