The NHS has suffered its first swine flu fatality. Dr Michael Day, a GP in Bedfordshire, died in Luton Hospital this weekend. Though he tested positive for swine flu, it is not clear that the virus was the cause of his death. Nevertheless, after the first fatality with no underlying pathology, these will be nervous times for all NHS staff, and their family and friends.

Writing about the NHS IT project feels a bit like beating a two-year-old at chess: it's easy to make yourself look clever, but only in an unreasonable context.

This is a first: never before, outside of conference season, have I posted four times in one day.

Hello. Busy day, so just a couple of quick links here: the Audit Commission and Academy of Medical Royal Colleges have released a guide to money for medics. This comes on the back of Lord Darzi's recent suggestion that budgets could be devloved to clinical teams, and is well worth a read.

Not everybody likes Professor Allyson Pollock's analysis of the involvement of the commercial sector in the NHS. Professor Pollock is, to put it mildly, clearly no fan of a mixed economy or competition, and she would appear to fundamentally distrust and oppose the involvement of the commercial sector in the NHS under all circumstances.

Good morning. The Independent draws our attention to the report from the EU on pharmaceutical industry competitiveness - or anti-competitiveness.

Those of you with longer memories will recall that I wrote about US economist Dr Christopher Ruhm's work on the health impacts of recessions a while ago.

Professor Ruhm's findings have been validated by EU-wide analysis research published in The Lancet.

Good morning to you. Today's post relates to heath policy tangentially, through the medium of economics; specifically, the government's announcement later today of its plans for the banking sector.

We have had to become a good deal more literate about the financial sector: the recession has semi-professionalised intelligent amateurs who care about public policy.

Mostly, it has been a very alarming experience to realise that the wealth creation of the past decade has been to a huge extent about leverage and securitisation.

Gambling, basically.

Hello. Today we have a new interview with Simon Stevens, conducted at the recent NHS Confederation conference in Liverpool.

The noisier debate about NHS reform over recent years focused more on the practical effects of Stevens' thinking about the introduction of choice and contestability into the NHS.

You may not yet understand the Mail newspaper’s secret mission.

You may have thought of it merely as a reactionary, anxiety-peddling, little-Englander middle-market tabloid full of comedy health scare stories; gaily juxtaposing finger-wagging features about eating disorders with a PR puff for the latest diet book and a bitchy column about celebrity cellulite; balancing the intermittent interesting bit of news with ‘did aliens build Stonehenge?’ features.