Regular readers will recall that we have been watching developments regarding NICE fairly closely.

In particular, you may recall our pieces about:

The creation of a national cancer drugs fund to undermine NICE

Earl Howe declaring NICE “somewhat redundant”

VERDICT: a much more effective, less disappointing performance from Labour. Shadow health secretary John Healey scored with his Office for Budget Responsibility's increased inflation forecast figures making NHS funding a real-terms cut of 0.25%, which forced Health Secretary Andrew Lansley into sophistry and evasiveness.

Lansley continued with his method of repeatingly emphasising one response (this month, it was “Labour wanted to cut NHS spending”) - this tactic is predictable, untailored and will soon run out of steam.

The Kings Fund's policy events are usually must-attends; irritatingly, a sick nanny prevented me being at their breakfast session this morning.

Robert Creighton, a very able and very experienced PCT chief executive, to whose day job running NHS Ealing has been added NHS Hounslow and NHS Hillingdon, took the career-limiting move of telling the truth at this morning's event.

- Dr Foster Intelligence were involved in this 2009 review with KPMG of NHS Choices - the service Dr Foster Intelligence launched in 2007, and for which they lost the contract at its re-tender in 2008

- DH provided Capita's commercially-contracted NHS Choices staff with free office space, IT support and clinical informatics products

Professor Alan Maynard asks, not for the first time (nor undoubtedly for the last time), where is the evidence to suggest that the proposed NHS reforms are going to work?

The Coalition Government, full of sufficient revolutionary vigour to bring a warm glow to Chairman Mao, is seeking to transform the public sector with radical reforms. Many of these reforms are intellectually intriguing … and as such, require careful piloting and evaluation.

Shadow Health Secretary John Healey continues to make smart moves, with this proposal, trailed on the Labour Uncut website, which aim to wrest the 'Big Society' agenda out of Cameroon and Coalition hands.

My good friend the late Professor Bob Sang accurately described himself as a "constructive subversive". Two other examples of this happy breed are GP, journalist and Countdown cynosure Dr Phil Hammond and the redoubtable patient advocate Daphne Havercroft.

Bristol health services and Phil Hammond have form: you will remember his role in using his seminal 'MD' column in Private Eye to express the concerns of Steve Bolsin and colleagues about the standards of paediatric heart surgery at the Bristol Royal Infirmary.

No man who will don a moustache throughout November to support a prostate cancer charity, as shadow health secretary John Healey did, can be deemed to lack a certain reckless chutzpah (bless you).

Healey is carrying this verve and elan into his opposition, as this letter to PM David Cameron, cc'd to Andrew Lansley and Oliver Letwin, shows:

Rt Hon David Cameron MP
Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
London SW1A 2AA

01 December 2010

Dear Prime Minister

It would be easy to think that the future NHS manager will be a GP - as Health Secretary Andrew Lansley seems to do, with his repeated confusion of prescribing and referring with commissioning.

It would also be wrong.

However, the future NHS manager won't be the previous NHS manager either.

Healthy Lives, Healthy People, the new public health White Paper, is out a few hours ahead of the scheduled embargo, and was not worth even this slightly-shorter-than-anticipated wait.

Sure, it's a bad title, but then Shark Sandwich is already taken.