What happens in practice is far more important than what is in a document that details the vision behind it, according to the Health Minister.

Last week the Manx Independent reported that more than 50% of the island’s integrated care vision document had been copied and pasted from Wigan Council, with examples given where names were changed with ’Jim from Leigh’, becoming ’Mohammed from Ramsey’.

Minister for Health and Social Care David Ashford MHK says that ’many integrated care plans in England are similar to each other’.

Mr Ashford added: ’The public accounts committee made much of the similarities between our vision document and that produced by the Healthier Wigan Partnership.

’In describing what we want integrated care in the Isle of Man to look like, we were bound to look at examples elsewhere, some of which have been under way for several years.

’We considered how well they were progressing and settled on one to guide us. The Wigan document offers a useful high-level summary of what integrated care is all about.

’That part we have used. However, much of the content is unique to the Isle of Man and this includes sections covering the intermediate care model at Ramsey Cottage Hospital, our strategy for mental health and young people, input from Public Health, demographic data and a section written by our third sector partners.’

During the committee hearing, members, led by chairman Juan Watterson SHK, questioned Department of Health and Social Care chief executive Dr Malcolm Couch and Michaela Morris, the department’s executive director for health and care.

However, Mr Ashford has criticised the amount of time the committee spent exploring the authorship of the document.

He said: ’In dwelling on our use of the Wigan integrated health and care strategy, the committee spent less time taking evidence about the vision itself.

’In my view, the document is far less important than what happens in practice and the pilot in the west is testament to things happening here and now.’

Since the committee hearing, the Examiner has discovered that this document is not the only one the DHSC has copied large parts of from other health jurisdictions.

In 2011, long before Mr Ashford became minister and the DHSC was the Department for Health, it published a document that was a five-year plan for dental health.

It was called Valuing our Oral Health - An Oral Health Strategy for the Isle of Man.

Large swathes of it was copied from a Salford document form 2007.

Like the recent document, ’Salford’ was just changed to read ’Isle of Man’.

In one section it reads ’while research shows that oral health is steadily improving across the UK, for many young children living within Salford this improvement has not been seen’, for the Manx version ’within Salford’ just became ’on the Isle of Man’.