BBC News reports that the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) has called for the Health and Social Care bill to be withdrawn. The RCGP represents 34,000 GPs in England and is the first medical royal college to oppose the NHS reforms outright. The BBC News story notes that this development is significant as under the reforms GPs will be given more say and control over how NHS funds are spent. The College said that the reforms had to be stopped because they threatened to cause "irreparable damage" to care. The College said that it could no longer work with government on the bill because its concerns over competition and bureaucracy had not been addressed. The RCGP also said the overhaul would slow down the ability of the NHS to deliver savings in the coming years to cope with factors such as the ageing population and rising cost of new treatments.

Dr. Clare Gerada, Chair of the RCGP told BBC Radio 4, “The decision was not taken lightly, but it is clear that the college has been left with no alternative. We cannot sit back. Instead, we must once again raise our concerns in the hope that the prime minister will halt this damaging, unnecessary and expensive reorganisation which, in our view, risks leaving the poorest and most vulnerable in society to bear the brunt." She told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that the bill would "turn the NHS into thousands of different health services, all competing for the same patients, the same knee, the same brain, the same heart. Patients will find their care will be fragmented, it will be on different sites, it won't join up, it will be difficult to hand over care and it will be phenomenally expensive to keep track of all these competing parts of the NHS."

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