TRUST me, I’m a doctor, the saying goes – but will that rock-solid faith survive this week’s NHS shake-up?

Maybe not, say the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) and British Medical Association (BMA), which are among groups worrying it will be badly damaged by the new set up.

In this region, a peek at the registered interests of the GPs that control the new Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) – and their £4bn budgets – illustrates the problem.

In Darlington, one is the director of a “private medical aesthetics business” called Blacketts Skin and Laser Clinic, I discovered.

In Durham Dales, one GP is a director of Gatehouse (Health) Ltd, a company that already runs services in Hartlepool, while another provides private occupational health services.

He or she has also worked for drug companies AstraZeneca, GSK, MSD, Schering Plough, Boehringer Ingleheim, Sanofi-Aventis, Sanofi-Pasteur, Otsuka Pfizer, Jannsen Cilag, adding: “This list is not exhaustive.”

In North Durham, one GP runs a private surgery in “ENT [ear, nose and throat], dermatology, minor surgery and palpitations which I financially benefit from”.

This week, the CCGs – run by GPs, remember – took over responsibility, from primary care trusts (PCTs), for “buying” operations and treatments for NHS patients.

In the new, market-loving NHS, they are required to allow private firms to compete for contracts – raising fears that parts of the health service will whittle away.

The Department of Health has insisted there are strict guidelines to ensure any conflicts of interest are avoided. It told me, rather vaguely: “CCGs must have arrangements in place to manage potential conflicts of interest.

CCGs must also ensure transparency and integrity in their decision making.”

No one is suggesting that GPs have, en masse, taken on this new commissioning role – reluctantly, in many cases – out of some desire to line their own pockets.

And the set-up is a world away from Andrew Lansley’s original, truly bonkers plan for GPs to control budgets with no outside involvement whatsoever.

However, as the hunt for £20bn of NHS “efficiency” savings goes on, these GPs are going to be thrust into the painful role of making cuts and denying treatments. Those forced to live with painful hips and cataracts may start to doubt the motives behind decisions made by GPs with bulging private portfolios.

As the RCGP put it: “The consequences could badly undermine the confidence of regulators, providers and – most importantly – patients.”

CHALLENGED to live on £53-a-week, Iain Duncan Smith thundered that he would take “no bloody lessons” on poverty – revealing he had “lived on the breadline twice”.

The Work and Pensions Secretary has been unemployed twice, telling the Daily Mail: “I didn’t have any financial backing and I had to pick up the pieces, find another job and get back to work.”

However, his second period of joblessness – however traumatic – came in 1992, a full decade after he married Betsy, the daughter of an aristocrat, the 5th Baron Cottesloe.

The couple later moved into a £2m country house, on his Buckinghamshire estate – suggesting Mr Duncan Smith has an, er, interesting idea of where the breadline lies.