PLANS to pilot a major overhaul of the NHS in Oxfordshire are “fraught with risk and full of unknowns” a doctors’ leader has warned.

County doctors are gearing up for a trial of controversial plans to let GPs decide how 80 per cent of the NHS budget is spent.

Spending power currently rests with NHS Oxfordshire, the primary care trust, which will be abolished, along with other PCTs in England and Wales, by 2013.

About 240 doctors and health officials attended the launch of the scheme on Saturday at the Kassam Stadium in Oxford and heard about talks with Prime Minister David Cameron and Health Secretary Andrew Lansley.

Dr Paul Roblin, the chief executive of the British Medical Association’s Berks, Bucks and Oxon local medical committee, said: “It’s fraught with risk and full of unknowns, but it’s unlikely that Government policy will be reversed.

“People who are tasked with it have to get on and develop the skills and knowledge to organise structures to take on the mantle of PCTs.”

Timescales for the pilot scheme and the amount of money the GPs will spend during the trial have yet to be settled.

All PCT commissioning staff will be made redundant.

Dr John Galuszka, chairman of the Oxfordshire commissioning group, said: “Both Andrew Lansley and the Prime Minister emphasised that this is a bottom-up process, encouraging GPs to keep modernising the NHS and improve quality.”

The changes will hand control of £80bn of the NHS’s £110bn annual budget to GPs, with 141 “pathfinder” consortiums of GPs piloting the new system.

Mr Lansley told those at the Downing Street meeting: “I welcome the enthusiasm for making the modernisation of the NHS a reality, so we can deliver better care for patients.”