DOCTORS and union officials last night attacked the Government’s prescription for an overhaul of the NHS.

Yesterday Health Secretary Andrew Lansley announced details of the Health and Social Care Bill, which he says will transform the country’s health system.

But doctors in Oxfordshire say the reforms might not give them the extra powers that ministers claim will be put in their hands.

The plans will see all 152 of England’s primary care trusts, including NHS Oxfordshire, scrapped along with the 10 strategic health authorities, leading to the predicted loss of 24,500 jobs.

Almost 21,000 of these losses will be through redundancy, while the rest will involve people leaving the NHS or retiring.

NHS Oxfordshire, which has its headquarters in Cowley, employs 300 people involved in the commissioning of health care.

GPs will be given control of about 80 per cent of the NHS budget – which is currently about £100bn a year – to commission treatment for their patients.

A new NHS commissioning board will oversee this process and new health and wellbeing boards will also be created as part of the changes.

The Government said a patient-centred NHS was a “step closer to reality”, but the plans got a cool reaction from doctors and health unions in Oxfordshire.

Abingdon GP Dr Prit Buttar said at first sight the changes seemed to be a continuation of central control.

He added: “There will be an NHS board at national level, with consortia below it.

“The board will publish ‘guidance’ to the consortia on how they commission, and consortia are required to act with ‘regard to guidance’.

“This could mean that the board will dictate precisely how, and with whom, services are to be commissioned. As always, the devil will be in the detail.

“Mr Lansley has said a great deal about removing political interference from health care. If the Secretary of State is able to tell the board to issue guidance on topic X, and consortia are then required to act with regard to this guidance, it will be business as usual, with the centre dictating policy to the periphery – not remotely a good thing.”

Dr Joe McManners, a GP and Labour councillor in Oxford, said: “It seems as though the commissioning board could be quite controlling. We will have to look more closely at the detail.”

Karen Jennings, head of health for the union Unison, which has thousands of Oxfordshire members, added: “This Titanic health bill threatens to sink our NHS.

“The only survivors will be the private health companies that are circling like sharks, waiting to move in and make a killing.”

The cost of implementing the changes is £1.4bn but Mr Lansley claims they will save the NHS more than £5bn by 2014-15 and £1.7bn a year after that.

He said: “Modernising the NHS is a necessity, not an option, in order to meet rising need in the future, we need to make changes.”