The NHS Confederation has confirmed that Sue Slipman, the director of their foundation trust network, has today been suspended from her role.

After a day of hearing about how "shocking" it all was (Mary Whitehouse would be proud), Sir Philip Green's report into government procurement has finally emerged. Its cover states, "The Government is failing to leverage both its credit rating and its scale".

The Shareholder Executive are going to be very busy.

On slide 29, the (un-named) Department of Health gets it in the neck thus:
"There is inefficient management of the estate, even within one department:

Irwin Brown of the Socialist Health Association looks at federation (because nobody else is).

The management thinker Russell Ackoff famously wrote, "'quality' is a term so vague as to be practically meaningless. Use it as often as you can!".

In Nick Goodwin's latest blog for the Kings Fund, he explores what quality improvement means - and should mean - in general practice. It is based on this new discussion paper for the Kings Fund inquiry into the quality of general practice, which is itself an excellent and thought-provoking document.

So, what have we learned in recent days?

On Saturday, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley told BBC Radio 4 Today that the issue for GPs is not the goal of policy - greater GP involvement in commissioning and decommissioning services - but its implementation.

Extracts from Professor Steve Field's (edited) speech to the Royal College of General Practitioners follow below.

Key quotes:

Health Service Journal editor Alastair McLellan tweets that Health Secretary Andrew Lansley told an event at his party conference this week, “patient choice drives integration of care”.

Initially, this looks like an odd statement. I think it probably is an odd statement.

The first thing it brought to mind was Walter Leutz’s 1999 article ‘Five laws for integrating medical and social services: lessons from the United States and the United Kingdom’ (Milbank Quarterly, 77, pp 77–110).

John Healey, MP for Wentworth and Dearne since Tony Blair's 1997 landslide, is the new shadow health minister (Andy Burnham goes to shadow education).

Healey was Minister for Housing and Planning at the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) June 2009 - May 2010, after a spell as local government minister since 2007.

Listening to the BBC Radio 4 PM coverage of this survey of GPs' attitudes towards commissioning, I was struck that pollsters Com-Res's sample size (just over 800) was quite small.

The survey asked about the White Paper's proposals on GP involvement in commissioning. 23% of respondents said it would benefit patients; 45% said it would not; and 32% expressed no opinion.

The First Law Of Holes is that when you find you're in one, you really should stop digging.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley is very unlikely to do this, although it is now blindingly obvious that he is in one. The consultation responses to his White Paper - and it really is very much his White Paper - have been polite about the underlying concept of patient-centricity and clinical input into commissioning; but almost uniformly on a spectrum from cautious to negative about its actual detail and implementability.