国际英语新闻：British gov't announces biggest change to National Health Service in 60 years

LONDON, July 9 (Xinhua) -- The new British coalition government revealed on Friday that it planned to put doctors in charge of funding for frontline services in England's National Health Service (NHS), in a change hailed as the biggest in 60 years.

The change will see family doctors handling budgets totalling 80 billion pounds (about 120 billion U.S. dollars), and they will deal directly with hospitals. They will choose which treatments are necessary for patients and also choose which hospitals they go to, and they will then pay for those treatments.

The NHS is a free health, comprehensive health service for all British citizens, funded from a tax paid by workers and employers. The 80 billion pounds the doctors will handle in future represents a huge chunk of the NHS's annual 100 billion pound budget.

At the moment the government gives money to primary care trusts (PCTs) which then pay hospitals and other providers for healthcare services.

The move will see the scrapping of 150 primary care trusts and strategic health authorities, which cover a range of NHS trusts and supervise local NHS services.

It could cost the jobs of tens of thousands of administrative workers in the PCTs.

A formal announcement will be made next week in a government white paper, which will be revealed by health secretary Andrew Lansley.

Under the reforms, doctors, also known as general practitioners (GPs), will be encouraged to form groups to pay for and administer services. They are likely to recruit experts to help them do the job, possibly from those who lose their jobs with PCTs.

The plan is to form about 500 groups, covering about 8,000 doctors' practices. The reform would only affect healthcare in England, not in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.

The scheme will be compulsory. A similar scheme over 13 years ago foundered when few doctors were willing to shoulder the extra management responsibilities necessary.

Nigel Edwards, the acting head of the NHS Confederation (which represents nearly all healthcare organizations) told the BBC, in a radio interview, "I think the concept here is lots of individual decisions by GPs, when they make referrals and send people to hospital, will be added up and we will have a greater market dynamic.

"GPs will also help plan services and direct strategy for hospitals by telling hospitals what they need for the longer term.

"We will have to see the details in the white paper. but I think this is quite a major shift because the end product of these reforms will probably end up looking like the gas and telecom market rather than the NHS we have been used to in the sense big organizations making big contracts."

The chairman of the British Medical Association's GP committee, Dr Laurence Buckman, said: "We will have to see the details, but there is certainly a willingness to look at this."

Services could improve, he said, as doctors could respond quicker to patients' needs, and they would also be able to influence more directly long-term strategy in the NHS.

British media quoted the Daily Telegraph newspaper as saying the reform represented a victory for Lansley over the Treasury, the finance ministry, whose chief, chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne, had expressed concern over giving doctors control over so much money.

The Daily Telegraph reported that prime minister David Cameron backed Lansley's argument.

The coalition government came to power in May facing a record public spending deficit and has embarked on the most drastic and far-reaching cuts in public spending since the Second World War.

However, it exempted health care from the need to cut its budgets. Despite this, the NHS budget is under pressure from an increasingly elderly population, from rising treatment and drug costs, and from emerging health problems such as the growing prevalence of obesity.

Any savings it can make will be redeployed in other areas of NHS health care where there is strong demand.

Lansley's white paper next week is also expected to spell the end for England's 10 strategic health authorities (SHA), which are responsible for overseeing local healthcare.

Running costs annually for the SHAs and the PCTs are about 1.6 billion pounds (about 2.4 billion U.S. dollars) and even though frontline healthcare services are protected from the government budget cuts, administrative costs are not and the government aims to cut management by about 30 percent.

The reform is likely to draw strong opposition from unions.