The "big tent" inclusiveness so beloved of New Labour's approach to making and implementing policy is not only alive and well in the NHS - as the lineup of the modernisation taskforce members reveals, it is positively thriving.
No fewer than 143 "frontline" NHS staff, as well as a host of familiar names from staff and patient lobby groups, have been appointed to the 10 taskforces which are charged with driving forward Labour's NHS plan.
This is on top of a 31-strong modernisation board responsible for assessing the progress of the NHS plan, producing an independent annual report and advising ministers.
Many of the 170-odd taskforce members were among the 100 NHS and patient representatives who served on five modernisation action teams, whose deliberations earlier this year fed into the NHS plan.
The taskforces and the board will work alongside the modernisation agency announced in the NHS plan in July. The agency, which will operate in each NHS region, will oversee the redesign of services in local trusts to make them more patient-friendly and efficient.
"Many of the taskforce members are leading-edge modernisers - managers, clinicians and patients, who, because they know the NHS, are in the best position to help us with the task of reforming the NHS," says health secretary Alan Milburn.
But can a board handpicked by the secretary of state to advise him be truly independent? Is it just an ideologically friendly kitchen cabinet created to impose a veneer of consensus around a politically contentious group?
There have also been reservations about the make-up of the board, on the grounds both that it rewards Labour sympathisers, and also brings inside potential critics such as the BMA, therefore neutralising them.
Certainly, there is a core of Labour sympathisers. Both Birmingham University oncologist David Kerr and Breakthrough Breast Cancer chief executive Delyth Morgan have shared a Labour party conference platform with ministers in recent years.
Tom Coffey, the south London GP, is a party activist and longtime cheerleader for New Labour. Chai Patel, chairman of Westminster Healthcare, helped fund the pro-modernisation lobby, NHS Network. But there are surprise appointments too, notably the maverick proto-moderniser Roger Thayne, chief executive of Staffordshire ambulance service, who will sit on the coronary heart disease taskforce.
His anti-establishment outspokenness has, in the past, managed to alienate most of the UK ambulance service and large parts of the Department of Health, as well as former health secretary Frank Dobson.
Thayne has survived because Staffordshire has consistently recorded the best 999 performance figures in the UK, using controversial methods that have turned conventional thinking on emergency pre-hospital care upside down. Flamboyant former NHS manager Ray Rowden, now visiting professor at York University, is another maverick. He is pro-NHS modernisation and a Labour Party member, but by no means respects the party line or NHS establishment niceties.
There are also one or two figures associated with the Tories, including William Wells, chairperson of NHS southeastern region, who was a minor Labour hate-figure in his role as the ardently pro-free market chair of the Royal Free Hampstead Trust in the early 90s.
But, in a sense, it is less the individual talents of the taskforce members that give it its powers than the collective authority, affecting staff and political opponents, that they bring to the modernisation project.
The vast array of stakeholders gives the impression of a huge "popular front" of NHS interests arranged behind the NHS plan. The names, as Milburn puts it, "symbolise my determination to ensure that changes in the NHS are driven by people within the NHS".
Key points
The 10 modernisation taskforces will cover:
• faster services
• coronary heart disease
• cancer
•mental health
• older people
• children
• inequalities and public health
• the workforce
• capital and capacity
• improving performance
The NHS modernisation agency's role is to "help local clinicians and managers redesign local services around the needs and convenience of patients". Key areas of service redesign will include cutting waiting times in casualty departments and for heart and cancer treatment, and simplifying the way patients access care, from admission to discharge.
• Patrick Butler.
