Wide-ranging reforms of the National Health Service will be recommended by a public inquiry into serious failings of care at a scandal-hit hospital, it has been reported.

The £11 million review of what went wrong at Stafford Hospital between January 2005 and March 2009 will suggest hospitals that cover up mistakes and poor treatment of patients should face fines and possible closure, a report said.

And Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said in a newspaper article that the NHS needed a "change of culture".

"Patients must never be treated as numbers but as human beings, indeed human beings at their frailest and most vulnerable," he wrote.

The inquiry is due to report back this month. It was reported that the inquiry will set out recommendations including a "duty of candour" that would see fines or the threat of closure used against hospitals that fail to tell patients their treatment went wrong; greater regulation of management; a reform of training for nurses and healthcare assistants, and stronger patient representative bodies. It was commissioned in 2010 after a separate, highly critical, report by the Healthcare Commission the previous year revealed a catalogue of failings at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust and said "appalling standards" put patients at risk.