Three quarters of changes concern altering name of family doctor groups and may obscure more serious issues
More than three quarters of the 1,000 ministerial amendments to the government's flagship NHS bill involve changing the name of the new GP bodies to purchase treatment on behalf of the patients, it emerged on Tuesday.
Until this summer, the government had been pushing the idea that family doctors would form "consortia" to buy care. However, David Cameron's team of experts, the Future Forum, advocated a name change since "consortia" gave the impression that GPs would be too powerful in the coalition's new look NHS.
Instead GP consortia are to be called "clinical commissioning groups" and will have governing bodies with at least one nurse and one specialist doctor.
The result, say critics, is a bureaucratic nightmare with a slew of meaningless amendments which could obscure some potentially disastrous changes to the NHS bill, already the longest and most complex in the NHS's history. MPs are to vote on the final report stage in the Commons next week.
Since the government only allowed two weeks to vote on the new bill earlier this summer, many say detailed scrutiny will be needed in the Lords to unearth the full implications for patients. Labour believe only one in 10 changes will be "new" amendments.
John Healey, Labour's shadow health spokesman, said that "having allowed so little time for the health bill committee to scrutinise the repackaged NHS plans, this again shows David Cameron and his ministers looking to railroad their legislation through the Commons. MPs will get only two days to debate these amendments next week, as the prime minister and his deputy hope to square everything off before their party conferences."
The department of health confirmed that the name changes would be "more than 75%" of the changes to the NHS bill.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/31/nhs-bill-amendments-mainly-name-changes
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