A doctors’ leader said this week that plans for GPs in Oxfordshire to form a major new consortium to purchase health services for their patients were “fraught with risk and full of unknowns”.

That seems to us something of an understatement.

Our report this week carries little or no detail about how the new system will work in practice. It appears that this is because there is no detail.

In a very short space of time — we do not know how much time because, again, there is no detail — commissioning staff at the primary care trust NHS Oxfordshire will be made redundant and a new structure, run by the GPs’ consortium, will be built in its place.

Oxfordshire is one of 141 pathfinder groups that will be testing out the new system, with a view to it being rolled out across the country by 2013.

This is Government policy so our GPs must ultimately form a consortium to deliver it.

We do wonder, however, whether we would be better waiting for the ‘pathfinders’ to make their mistakes first.