Evening, all.

Sit down and have a relaxing drink - you deserve it.

So does HPI associate director Tom Smith, whose fresh dose of Health Policy Today summarises where we are tonight and likely to be come Monday morning better than anything else I have seen. Enjoy.

Tonight's editor's blog is, as ever, being brought to you from the 'home of UK health policy'.

And for almost all of the (first?) 2010 general election campaign, UK health policy has been The Dog That Didn't Bark.

Good evening. Slight pause in posting: I have been off, saving the world.

(OK, that is not strictly true, I have been off working for clients.)

In the meantime, the redoubtable but undoubted Professor Alan Maynard has provided you with a quick new pre-electoral dose of Maynard Doctrine here.

How to vote
Do you need me - or anyone - to know how you should vote tomorrow? I cannot and do not believe that HPI readers are so empty-headed as to want some hack telling them for whom they should vote.

Hurrah! Andy Burnham has promised that the Whittingdon won't lose its A&E and maternity.

This means all three parties are now committed to keeping the Whittingdon fully open as it is now.

Here's a little game to celebrate.

From BBC News comes the re-announcement by the Conservatives (can't find any other reference) that they will give £200 million to a cancer fund to pay for drugs that expert rationing body NICE thinks do not work sufficiently to be cost-effective - even following the liberalisation of NICE definitions of what expensive end-of-life drugs should be used, mandated by the Richards Review.

The Academy of Royal Medical Colleges today suggests that cuts could be good for patient care. In a well-timed intervention, this consortium of the Great And Good swing their considerable weight behind rationalisation of NHS services.

Oh dear. Oh dear.

On what is already a dreadful day for Labour, with PM Gordon Brown calling a difficult voter “bigoted”, things got little better for The People's Party when Andy Burnham seriously misled the BBC2 Daily Politics health hustings.

You can find very roughly transcribed notes of the event (which was fairly good, overall) below.

In this Guardian feature by David Hare on the theatrics of Cleggmania, an interesting point is raised about the possible future of a more mutually-provided NHS.

Nobody has summarised the Daily Mail better than The Daily Mash website.

Michael Rawlins’ elegant recent rejoinder to a magnificent and 70+% wrong Mail story deserved mention.

But the Mail has excelled itself with this world-class piece of bullshit.

If Gordon Brown wants a new job come May 7, he could retrain to be a nurse manager. He successfully managed to get RCN activists off their arses twice in one afternoon yesterday.

We guarantee something you can’t legally enforce
This comes on the back of the comically odd new Labour health manifesto, Your Personal NHS Guarantee, launched yesterday.

Good evening. You will find another new instalment of Maynard Doctrine here, in which the good Professor addresses himself to the impact of slowing spending on the NHS budget.

I don't say "the likely impact" because almost nobody I've spoken to over the past couple of years seriously believes promises that the NHS budget will be protected. For all the warnings from ministers against conducting mini-spending reviews, the smarter ones have been modelling real-terms reductions.