First, it was targets. I definitely remember the Conservatives promising to abolish targets.

Next was added a variety of adjectives: "process" targets, or "clinically unjustified" targets.

But they were definitely going to abolish targets.

Hello.

I'm going to be stupidly busy today, so would offer for your edification this excellent analysis piece form Sally Gainsbury for HSJ.

Financial governance matters greatly; the more so when other departments are having 25% of their budgets cut so that health can have protected, real-terms growth. Whatever 'real-terms' may mean.

Oh no, Hamish. No, no, noooooooo.

This is a bit silly.

I know there is a view that the BMA is at its best when it’s battling a Conservative government, as when opposing the introduction of the internal market.

Even Justice Secretary, chubby tobacconist and then-Health Secretary Kenneth Clarke admitted that the BMA won the PR war for public opinion over the internal market.

We don’t even know yet what GP-led commissioning is going to be called.

It might be called ‘clinical commissioning’. It might be called ‘Eric’.

We do know that it is not going to be called GP practice-based commissioning (PBC), and on the evidence of the new DH Year Three survey on PBC, that is A Good Thing.

Further to our recent mention of the gaiety that new Conservative Health Select Committee members Nadine Dorries and David Tredinnick promise bring to the world of health policy, we may have a front-bench find in Health Minister Simon Burns.

There is the kernel of a good idea in ex-PM Tony Blair's advice to PM David Cameron, as reported by The Guardian.

The good idea in question is that government is so different from opposition - indeed, from anything else you encounter - that an incoming administration should properly have informal conversations with the outgoing government about its experiences, aims and the cultural challenges of the civil service

FT regulator Monitor looks set to become the NHS economic regulator envisaged in the Conservative pre-election health policy.

Its new chair Steve Bundred has been making significant noises about taking the assets of FTs off balance sheet – potentially, the single biggest step yet proposed towards the privatisation of the NHS.

Good morning. As we re-enter daily reality (or what passes for it) post-Confed, having come home to gardens looking more savannah than suburbia, we will wash up a few bits from the conference shortly.

Message Number One: he wants to stay. The clock has definitely stopped on ‘NHS chief executive Sir David Nicholson (and counting)’. So if Lansley wants to get rid of him, there will be trouble. That was the first message of Nicholson’s characteristically energetic speech to close the 2010 NHS Confederation conference in Liverpool.

Message Number Two: we got no hard news of details or deadlines - the introduction of the new system is going to be a gradual “transition”, over “the next two to three years”.

The HPI interview with Dr Peter Brambleby, Joint Director of Public Health, NHS Croydon and Croydon Council, is now online.

Previous instalments in this interview series:
Nigel Edwards, acting CE, NHS Confederation
Andrew Donald, chief operating officer, NHS Birmingham East and North PCT
Michael Sobanja, CE, NHS Alliance