New King's Beam House near Blackfriars Bridge was formerly a Department of Health office prior to the expiry of its lease in October 2011.

These changes left "29,193 junior doctors from the UK and overseas... chasing 15,600 posts..."[25] and resulted in accusations that the DH had broken the law by refusing to reveal scores to candidates.

[27] MTAS was eventually scrapped[28] and Patricia Hewitt, the then Secretary of State for Health, resigned[clarification needed] following accusations that she had lied to the House of Commons over the system.

[30] Successive DH ministerial teams have been criticised for repeated reorganisations of the NHS in England, where primary care commissioning responsibility, in particular, has been allocated to four different sets of organisations in the last ten years: PCGs,[clarification needed] small area primary care trusts (PCTs) (e.g. covering a rural local authority district or part of a city), larger-area PCTs (e.g. covering a whole county), PCT clusters (e.g. quarter of London or South of Tyne and Wear) and the currently unspecified Clinical Commissioning Groups.

The tendency to introduce each reorganisation before its predecessor has had time to settle down and generate improved performance has attracted censure amongst healthcare professions in the UK and beyond, including reference to the ironic concept of 'redisorganization'.

[34] In September 2008 a new leadership team was established, CIO for Health, Christine Connelly, and director of programme and system delivery Martin Bellamy.

Previous CIO Richard Granger was believed to have been the most highly paid civil servant in the UK and was a controversial figure.

[35] Connelly left the DH for a position in the Cabinet Office in June 2009 and was replaced by Tim Donohoe and Carol Clarke.

[citation needed] Connelly's role was to "deliver the Department's overall information strategy and integrating leadership across the NHS", according to the DH's website.

[needs update] On the eve of the departure of Fujitsu as an outsourcing partner, Connelly said in April 2009 that she would open up sourcing to competition at "acute" sites in the south of England and offer toolkits by March 2010 to allow more local configuration of systems.

[37] In January 2009, MPs criticised DH for its confidentiality agreement with key supplier CSC and in March the department was admonished by the Information Commissioner for its records management.

The NHS app is to be a "digital front door" for patients, with increasing functionality to be added and remote consultations with GPs are to be encouraged.

[citation needed] In order to minimise redundancy costs,[citation needed] the predominant impact was upon DH staff not employed through a traditional civil service 'headcount' contract, with a resultant emphasised effect upon more recent or innovative work-streams dependent upon seconded or externally hosted staff.

This has attracted criticism from several of the professional and patient communities of interest concerned, for instance as regards the impact upon Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT)[41] and the withdrawal of the practical assistance available to the NHS and local authorities via the national support teams.

[43] A number of health issues are, however, wholly or partly reserved to Westminster: [44] [45] In Northern Ireland, abortion law is a criminal justice matter and is devolved.