Family practitioner committees were established by the National Health Service Re-organisation Act 1973.
They replaced local executive councils, which had been established in 1948 to manage primary care.
[1] The role of the council was to maintain GPs’ lists of patients and to receive practitioners’ claims for payment.
[2] Each family practitioner committee had thirty members, eleven of which were appointed by the area health authority with which it was coterminous.
Nearly half of all family practitioner committee administrators were sacked, and the new appointees came from outside the NHS, nearly all from industry or the armed forces.