NHS reforms are in danger of fragmenting public health services across different commissioners and professions, health experts have warned.

Speakers at the all-party parliamentary group on primary care and public health's summer reception, held on June 9, suggested the Health and Social Care Act could jeopardise work to improve public health by increasing competition between professions.

But health secretary Andrew Lansley assured the reception that this was the "hardest time" in the reforms and reaffirmed his commitment to tackle public health problems at a local level.

"While it's very clear where everything goes the danger is you can't put public health services into little pockets like that. They're all interdependent" Paul Edmondson-Jones, York public health

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"We're at a point where people are thinking about what [the reforms] mean and how they will work in practice," he said. "That's the hardest time in any change like this – when you're trying to deliver business as usual while designing architecture for the future." Mr Lansley stressed that local government was the "best place" to tackle health inequalities and argued that "a range of interventions" was needed to address public health challenges such as alcohol abuse and obesity. Paul Edmondson-Jones, director of public health in York and member of the pharmacy and public health forum, agreed that the challenges needed input from a number of professions. But he questioned whether the NHS reforms would encourage this collaboration.

"While it's very clear where everything goes – some things go to clinical commissioning groups, some go to the NHS commissioning board and some go to Public Health England – the danger is you can't put [public health services] into little pockets like that. They're all interdependent," he told C+D.

"Sexual health services, for example, need everyone working together and the danger is that they get fragmented," Dr Edmondson-Jones argued. "Who's looking to see if they are joining up? If they don't, we could find that patients – particularly more vulnerable patients – fall through the cracks."

Dr Edmondson-Jones forecast that the new framework would create competition between professions – stressing that this could also mean certain areas of patient care were overlooked. "Some elements of the system may say ‘it's not our job to do that'. But what happens if another part of the system says ‘it's not our job either'?" he asked.

Richard Parish, chief executive of the Royal Society for Public Health and leader of the pharmacy and public health forum, reiterated the fears over fragmentation. He named commissioning as the "weak point" in the NHS.

"I don't doubt the aspiration in commissioning but at the moment it's patchy and has the potential to be providing a fragmented system," Professor Parish told the reception. "The onus on public health in the NHS is right, but I do have some serious concerns about the implementation and delivery."

The comments came after NHS Future Forum representative Ash Soni slammed the "horrendous" fragmentation of the health service under the reforms.