A FORMER MP and hospital consultant says health reforms could lead to the privatisation of the NHS as foreign firms interested purely in profit take over key services in Worcestershire.

Dr Richard Taylor, a former Wyre Forest MP and a ex-hospital consultant at Kidder-minster Hospital, has backed Dr Bryan Smith’s concerns about the scale and scope of radical Government reforms.

We reported last week how Dr Smith, chairman of NHS Worcestershire, said reforms, which include putting GPs in charge of multi-million NHS budgets in Worcestershire, was a mess, although he expressed hope a sensible solution could be found.

He also said the handling of reforms was being placed in the hands of amateurs and that talented NHS staff had been demotivated by being described simply as “bureaucrats”, some of whom, including doctors and nurses, had already left the NHS.

Dr Taylor, also president of Independent Community and Health Concern, said the major problem with the Health and Social Care Bill is the aim to increase competition by opening the NHS to “any willing provider”, which he said risks fragmenting the health service.

He said: “The Bill as it stands risks, under European competition laws, handing over control of hospitals and GPs’ surgeries to private, probably foreign firms whose primary interest will be profit. NHS service provision will dwindle and be left with the more expensive, complicated or emergency treatments with less resources to provide them as they will have lost the routine, cheaper services that are essential for training and for subsidising the costs of the more expensive procedures.

“I believe the changes in the Bill are a massive, inappropriate reorganisation that will distract NHS staff from current problems in the NHS and that the Bill should be thrown out and that alternative, less disruptive plans for changes to the NHS, largely based on work of the previous Health Select Committee, should be instituted instead.”

Dr Taylor has made a number of proposals including reducing so-called “never events” such as surgery where instruments are left inside a patient’s body, reviewing the out-of-hours service, and making sure NHS managers are more accessible to patients and staff.

He said: “The Health Secretary’s proposed solution is wrong, lacks evidence to support it and is untenable because it increases competition which will fragment the NHS.”