MANAGERS have spent more than £650,000 to cover for local doctors trying to set up new organisations as part of the country’s health reforms.

The Health and Social Care Bill gives GPs and other clinicians more responsibility for spending the NHS budget in England.

It will see local primary care trusts dismantled by 2013 and the responsibilities taken up by local commissioning groups of health care professionals, including GPs.

From April next year, the clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) will gradually gain control of £60bn of NHS funds as they replace PCTs in commissioning and paying for treatments on behalf of patients.

Freedom of information requests submitted to NHS primary care trusts (PCTs) by lobby group False Economy, show how many GPs are involved in setting up CCGs, how much time each is spending preparing the new set-up rather than treating patients, and the cost to the NHS of their being re-directed into managerial tasks.

NHS Oxfordshire said in the last year it had spent £654,500 covering for eight local doctors.

The cost of covering for a GP doing one session a week with the CCG is £15,400 a year.

CCG chief executive Dr Stephen Richards, a Goring GP , is doing either seven or eight sessions a week with the new body, each lasting four hours and 10 minutes.

A spokesman for NHS Oxfordshire said: “In order to take on responsibility for clinical commissioning, some of the GPs involved in the Oxfordshire clinical commissioning group (OCCG) have given up clinical sessions (time spent in their practices seeing patients).

“So if a full-time GP undertakes three sessions of clinical commissioning a week they will give up three sessions of clinical time correspondingly.

“It is important to note that not all those GPs involved in developing OCCG were working full time as GPs. So in some cases there has been little or no impact on their clinical time.

“When GPs involved in OCCG give up a number of clinical sessions, each affected practice is able to use the available funds to backfill sessions with a locum GP.

“This does not affect the practices’ budget for providing healthcare.

“GPs involved in clinical commissioning are paid directly by the PCT from funds which have been set aside for clinical commissioning.”

It comes after doctors from 24 city GP surgeries wrote to the Oxford Mail in opposition to the Health and Social Care Bill, which sees the provision of healthcare opened up to ‘any willing provider’ including the private sector and charities.

A Department of Health spokesman said: “Without the Bill, doctors and nurses will always run the risk of having their decisions second-guessed by the managers running primary care trusts. The Bill cuts out this needless bureaucracy.”