DOZENS of jobs are to be axed as plans for GPs to manage NHS budgets move a step closer to reality.

NHS North East Essex’s primary care trust has set up a new committee to prepare doctors to take over the reins when the trust is abolished.

Some of the trust’s 200 staff are likely to transfer to jobs supporting the new consortium.

However, dozens of jobs will be lost as its staffing budget will be 45 per cent smaller than the trust’s.

In the meantime, the committee will run within the trust, taking increasing responsibility for its work, before a GP consortium takes over the purse strings for the care of 320,000 patients across Colchester and Tendring.

Elections will now be held for doctors, nurses and practice staff to sit on the board of the new consortium.

Dr Gary Sweeney, joint chairman on the new committee and chairman of Tendring Clinical Commissioning Group, said: “Primary care trusts have taken what they do as far as they can.

“First and foremost they are lumbered with bureaucracy and it makes what they do very slow and clunky.

“GPs are used to having ten minutes with a patient in which to assess the situation, make a decision and do something.

“We would like to do that in the bigger picture and the trust is very willing to let us have a go.”

His counterpart, Dr Shane Gordon, chief executive of the Colchester practice-based commissioning group, insisted GPs would not let falling budgets get in the way of clinical judgement.

He said: “When you have an individual patient in front of you, part of your duty as a doctor is to use the health service efficiently for the best interest of patients.

“Making decisions across populations is more complicated, and that’s where we need the support of expert colleagues to understand it.”