Frank Dobson has called on ministers to halt health service reforms and preserve the "public sector ethic".

The former health secretary extended his criticism of plans to set up foundation hospitals to all NHS structural reform.

"If you ask anyone who works in the National Health Service, they are sick to death of structural reform," he told Unison activists.

"I wish we would stop talking about reform. Reform means nothing to the public and just irritates virtually everybody working in the public sector."

Dobson says health workers have been hit by wave after wave of fashionable but useless change.

"They've been reformed, and then the reforms are so useless that there are further reforms and then those reforms are so useless that there are further reforms and its gone on and on an on."

He argues that the government should drop its "meaningless" reform rhetoric - widely regarded by many trade unions as a cover for privatisation - and focus on "micro" ground level improvements

"What we should talk about is improvement and I don't think there is any evidence that structural change brings about improvement. all its does is consume huge amounts of money and vast amounts of time for people who would be better spent bringing about the micro improvements at the local level that people want to see," said the Holborn and St Pancras MP.

Alan Milburn's "permanent revolution", Dobson suggests, is distracting health workers and introducing a climate of fear."I think that we are in danger of, once again, coming in for further structural changes and diverting the effort of all those people who are actually trying to do something for patients, constantly wondering whether they're still going to have their job at the end of the next period of change," he said.

Dobson is telling his one-time cabinet colleagues to back the staff and the ethic that sustained public services through 18 years of Conservative cuts.

"Throughout all those Tory lean and mean years it was the public service ethic that kept the NHS going, after going through the lean years I think the least we can do is keep it going through the fatter years now that Gordon's found some more money."