I’VE been a journalist for umpteen years now but I still find myself lost when it comes to covering health issues – because they make it so unnecessarily complicated.

Get this: the bureaucrats running our hospitals used to go under the name of Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust.

Bit long but it made sense.

But on my return from holiday last week, I find that they’ve changed the moniker.

In a statement, they say: “To mark the successful integration of Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust with Community Health Buckinghamshire, we have announced our new name, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust”.

Okay, it’s hardly rocket science, but the complicating factor for me is that there is another mob of officials who basically plan and secure health services in the county for GPs and hospitals etc.

They were called the Primary Care Trust or PCT. But they also recently changed their name to NHS Buckinghamshire There used to be health authorities and community health councils but these just seem to float away on the wind of change.

Frankly, I can’t keep up, and I doubt the public can either.

I went onto NHS Buckinghamshire’s website last week to make some sense of it all and read this piece of news from earlier this year: “Following ratification by the Boards of both NHS Buckinghamshire (NHSB) and Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust, it is announced that from 1 April 2010, Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust (BHT) has become the new partner of Community Health Buckinghamshire.”

That previous sentence just about sums it all up for me. I found Chaucer easier to read.

My suggestion is that Bucks New Uni (who also changed their name recently, by the way) now pioneer a course called Understanding Health Bureaucracy Jargon.

I also suggest there should be a health warning on all these various organisations’ websites telling people they may get a severe headache just trying to understand who does what.