As the House of Lords prepares to debate the health and social care bill next week, 400 public health experts have written to peers calling on them to reject the changes as pose a risk to patient care and safety: "it ushers in a significantly heightened degree of commercialisation and marketisation that will lead to the harmful fragmentation of patient care; aggravate risks to individual patient safety; erode medical ethics and trust within the healthcare system; widen health inequalities; waste much money on attempts to regulate and manage competition; and undermine the ability of the health system to respond effectively and efficiently to communicate disease outbreaks and other public health emergencies,"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/oct/03/nhs-bill-doctors-lords
