Letter to the editor: On April 1, Greenwich Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) will be handed a slice of £65bn of the NHS budget.

The government assures us CCGs will be open, transparent and engage with the public.

Worryingly, we have found a lack of transparency and engagement from Greenwich CCG.

Half of CCG meetings are closed to the public.

There is no website information about those meetings which are nominally open to the public.

The public is allocated 10 minutes at the end of the meeting and are dissuaded from further participation by a lack of agenda papers.

Requests for meetings with key staff have been ignored or delayed.

Requests for simple information have been diverted to the Freedom of Information route.

Lawyer-drafted amendments to the constitution have been ignored for months, and then briefly dismissed.

Transparency? What is going on?

An investigation by the British Medical Journal reported 36 per cent of the 1,179 family doctors on CCG Boards have a financial interest in private health companies.

Greenwich 38 degrees NHS Group