The United Kingdom’s leading professional body for public health specialists fears that the radical reforms outlined in the government’s NHS white paper could result in worse services.

The president of the Faculty of Public Health, Lindsey Davies, said that although the personal commitment of England’s health secretary, Andrew Lansley, to public health was “very encouraging, there are lots of ‘ifs’, ‘buts,’ and possible slips along the way.”

Introducing the faculty’s annual public health lecture and award ceremony in London on Wednesday 6 October, she said that the changes proposed in July’s Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS paper “could do a lot of good, but at the moment everything is very uncertain.”

The most important shift proposed in the white paper involves consortiums of general practices taking over …