Channel 4 News has the story that Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell is heading for the exit.

The story reports that he had intended to quit directly after the election, but stayed on to facilitiate the handover of power to the Coalition Government.

That is a man who knows the burial location of many a corpse, metaphorically speaking. His book should be genuinely worth reading, if he chooses to write one.

Irwin Brown of the Socialist Health Association looks at re-reconfiguration (again)

We had a phase in our local NHS when cuts were feared, and we saw campaigns about keeping open facilities that were not going to be shut (just in case). There was even a hard-fought campaign preventing moving a GP surgery from old inaccessible premises a few hundred yards down the road to better, bigger, modern premises.

The excellent E-Health Insider website reveals that NHS Northamptonshire has ended its contract for commissioning support with UnitedHealth UK a year early, after two years.

The UnitedHealth UK contract was reported by NHS Nothamptonshire CE John Parkes to be the biggest commissioning support contract let under the DH Framework For Procuring External Support In Commissioning (FESC).

The cloudy future of Dr Foster Intelligence?
A Health Policy Insight exclusive

- Health Secretary bought the NHS Information Centre's share in Dr Foster Intelligence for £8 million on 9 July; yet no announcement was made
- The NHS Information Centre and DH's reporting of Dr Foster Intelligence share ownership is difficult to unpick
- Dr Foster Intelligence's £1.5 million operating profit for 2009 (half of which went back to the public sector) was less than 7% of DFI's £22.1 million revenue in that year

These figures on healthcare costs, expressed by UK-funded pensioners moving abroad in the EU on a E121, are interesting.

The destination countries are no surprise: Spain wins by a country mile. France a significant second, with Cyprus third, and Italy, Germany, Greece and Portugal scrapping for a repercharge place.

But the stats for Ireland (as in Republic of) are intriguing.

Zero. Not one single person who has NHS 'cover' retired to Ireland.

Seems a bit curious.

Back at primary school, back in the day, we used to get free milk. If we were lucky, the crate was delivered not too long before mid-morning break, and the milk would still be coldish. But we weren't often lucky, and it was usually lukewarm

For me, the taste of lukewarm milk is Proustian. Marcel had his madeleines; I had little 1/3 pint-bottles of school milk. I'm not sure if that says more about Proust than me ...

The Telegraph proves the old truism that fear sells; in this case, it's selling health insurance. Wowsa.

BBC News looks at an Indian hospital bringing Fordist principles to healthcare.

... and this proves me right.

Again.

Commercial declarations of interest in NHS Professionals are being sought. Begging the question, shouldn't they have called it NHS Amateurs?

This extends the recent announcement on the fate of Arms' Length Bodies.

Accidents can and do happen. Web hosting renewal gets forgotten.

But it's interesting that just right now, we can't access the source of this story in the Mirror about Lib Dem equalities minister Lynne Featherstone's blog expressing concerns about private operations lengthening NHS waiting times - which is also referenced on her Twitter feed.