A report from the Productivity Commission shows more people die or are injured in Queensland hospitals than in any other state or territory.

The report shows there were 49 incidents that harmed or killed a patient in Queensland public hospitals in 2006-2007, which is almost a quarter of the national total for that financial year.

There were 187 of these serious errors - referred to as "sentinel events" in health management - across Australia.

The state with the second highest number of such events was Victoria, with 45, South Australia with 36, New South Wales with 32, Western Australia with 15, the ACT with seven, the Northern Territory with two and Tasmania with one.

They range from operations on the wrong patient or body part, leaving surgical instruments inside the body, death in child birth and infants discharged to the wrong family.

"A high number of sentinel events may indicate hospital systems and process deficiencies that compromise the quality and safety of public hospitals," the Productivity Commission said.

The report says there were 33 procedures in Queensland involving the wrong patient or body part compared to six the year before.

There were 29 in South Australia, 20 in Victoria, nine in New South Wales, six in Western Australia and one in Tasmania.

On 25 occasions across Australia people needed to have second operations to remove surgical instruments.

This occurred nine times in New South Wales, eight in Victoria, three Queensland and South Australia had three cases, and it happened twice in WA.

Of the 14 cases in which patients died after being given the wrong medication, six of them happened in Queensland (five more than the previous year), followed by New South Wales (three), Victoria (three) and WA (two).

Queensland's Opposition health spokesman Mark McArdle says the health system is still in crisis.

"Despite the billions of dollars poured into it by the Labor government what they've provided is a death trap," he said.

Four women died during childbirth in Queensland and one person fell seriously ill after an incompatible blood transfusion.

As well as the serious sentinel events, the report measured infection rates in four key procedures - hip replacement, knee reconstruction, lower segment caesarean section and abdominal hysterectomy.

Queensland had much lower rates of infection in the four procedures than the other states and territories.

The most common procedure was knee replacements, and the infection rate for this operation was 1.7 per cent in New South Wales, 1.5 per cent in Victoria, 0.4 per cent in Queensland and 0.6 per cent in Western Australia.