The wide-ranging reforms to the NHS proposed by the Coalition Government are proving to be one of the most contentious aspects of public service reform announced so far.

The moves that would see power for commissioning NHS services transferred from Primary Care Trusts (PCT) to GPs consortia, putting practitioners in charge of £80 billion of the total NHS spend.

However doubts have been raised as to whether GPs are the right people to be carrying out the role.

With PCTs set to be scrapped, do GPs have the resources at their disposal to take up the slack in terms of running the NHS?

Speaking earlier this week, Conservative MP Nadine Dorries, played down such concerns.

The Claim

In a debate over the reforms on Newsnight, Ms Dorries rejected the assertion that former PCT staff would simply have to be rehired in order to keep the NHS functioning.

The Mid-Bedfordshire MP said: “They [GPs] may or may not. It depends on who they employ to assist them. We actually have more administrators in most GP practices now than we actually have GPs"

When her claim was flagged up via Twitter, we decided to take look.

Analysis

The precise veracity of the claim is hard to demonstrate either way, but after contacting the NHS Information Centre we were able to get hold of figures that shed some light on the debate.

This record of total staff working in the GP practices shows that while 40,269 GPs were employed at practices, there were 92,333 non-GP staff.

Of course not all of these non-GP staff will be administrators, but a slightly more finessed set of figures are available.

Table 4 in this document gives the total number of admin and clerical staff working in GP practices as 51,233 while the total number of GPs is just over 40,000.

Given that detailed staffing breakdowns on a practice-by practice basis are not published this is perhaps the closest we can get. Given the higher numbers of clerical admin workers compared to GPs, one could argue that Ms Dorries claim is valid in a rough estimate, law of averages sense.

A spokesman for the NHS information centre did urge some caution drawing too strong a conclusion from the figures, since there is a level of uncertainty over what the PCTs, who compiled the data, had classed as clerical and administrative jobs.

Nevertheless there is certainly nothing in the data provided to us that raises doubts over the claim.

The quibble with the claim is whether it can be used in relation to speculation on the extent to which PCT staff will transfer to the new GPs

When we spoke to NHS Employers, a spokesman told us it was “generally accepted” that a lot of the people working in commissioning would be repositioned with the GP consortia.

However even an estimated figure on the amount of people that would be likely to be transferred would be extremely difficult, we were told.

The abolition of Primary Care Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities will see the closure of organisations employing almost 70,000 people in support roles.

Of these, just over 35,000 are clerical administrative staff. Nothing like all of these would be working in the kind of roles of that would be transferred to the GP consortia that will take up the commissioning role of the Primary Care Trusts.

Conclusion

On the simple point of the factual claim, what statistics are available show there are more administrative jobs in GPs practices and there are GPs, but of course this does not shed any light on individual practices.

The other problem is varying definitions of administrator. We tried to contact Ms Dorries for further information behind the claim, but are yet to receive a response.