The new DH press release reports Health Secretary Andrew Lansley CBE MP's keeping his promise, made in opposition, to grant a public inquiry into the events of Mid-Staffs. Its terms of reference are here.

So what is Lansleyism?
Now that at last the DH have put it online, we can review 'My ambition for patient-centred care' - the new Health Secretary's first major speech on the NHS.

Lansleyism, as we shall call it, starts with a commendable focus on achieving “health outcomes – and quality health services – as good as any in the world … a unique combination of equity and excellence, including for the most vulnerable”.

In the light of my recent comments about management consultants, I turned with interest to the new KPMG report – ‘Payment For Success’.

The Health Secretary's widely-trailed speech is allegedly now available online here.

Mmm. Except this is just a press release. Will get the working link for you as soon as it's there.

Analysis and commentary will then follow.

Update: 16.31 Just chased with DH press office, who promised to email me a copy; instead, they emailed the press release and a covering note saying it will be up "shortly" on DH site.

I think I may just be able to see an unintended consequence or two in Health Secretary Andrew Lansley CBE MP's new policy announcement today of fines for hospitals whose patients are readmitted as an emergency within 30 days, announced in today's Guardian.

Let us assume that the fines will not be negligible sums. (Let us do so because if they are negligible, people will pay them, and the policy will be discredited and ignored very fast).

None of my best friends are management consultants.

But even in the aftermath of the revelation that the DH funded such people to the tune of nearly half a billion pounds in 2009-10, I can see five main reasons why you might use such people.

Some of the reasons are better; some simply dispiriting.

Never can an acronym have been more appropriate.

Consultants at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) have given their chief executive a letter of no confidence.

Acording to the Sunday Telegraph's report, around half of the trust's consultant body have signed a letter of no confidence in the CE Dr Jane Collins, which was facilitated by the BMA.

That's a lot of coins.

As in Combined Online Information System (Coins).

Nearly half a billion pound coins, in fact. On consultants.

How very consultative.

Doesn't it make you feel proud?

An excellent piece of investigative journalism - a collaboration between the BMJ and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism - has revealed that the World Health Organisation failed to declare a crucial commercial conflict of interest on the part of scientists advising it about policy on swine flu vaccines.

Stolen from the Popbitch email:

A man was rushed to hospital when a bizarre sex game went wrong, leaving him with six toy horses stuck up his arse.

Doctors described his condition as stable.