The white paper says a new, national Health Watch will operate as an independent consumer champion from within the Care Quality Commission, which survives as a quality inspectorate.
Other quangos with an apparently assured future include Monitor, which is destined to become a market regulator; NICE, which will develop quality standards to replace targets for the NHS and social care; and the Information Centre, which is billed as having lead responsibility for collecting data to give patients more choice over their treatment and care.
The DH will eventually be slimmed down to become a Department of Public Health, while strategic health authorities will be "phased out" and trusts will be expected to become both foundation trusts and social enterprises.
However, at the press briefing, NHS chief executive Sir David Nicholson, said it might be necessary for the DH and SHAs to take more control in the short term. There is a very clear and coherent vision of the future of the NHS, he said.
The big issue is how we get from here to there. In the short term, we may need to take more control nationally and regionally of the money in order to decentralise later.
Much of the detail of the white paper will be fleshed out in strategies and documents that will be issued over the coming months.
However, in response to a question on the future of the National Programme for IT in the NHS, Sir David said: In the next four weeks we will be making an announcement on the NPfIT and how we will reconfigure and change it to reflect the bottom-up changes in this document [Liberating the NHS].
