The general experience of whistleblowers in the NHS is best encapsulated by Thomas Hobbes' description of the lives of people without civil society: "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".

A couple of unsurprises: The Lancet has at last formally retracted the Wakefield MMR paper.

Which is good news. Having edited a journal for eight years (albeit one which was about healthcare management), I'm keenly aware that you have to take what authors tell you on trust. It's often less well remembered that Wakefield's research was published with an accompanying editorial which made clear that great caution should be taken with such surprising and unusual experimental results.

In today's Guardian, James Meikle has got the inside track on the DH report on out-of-hours services, which is due out at the end of the week.

As I mentioned at the time, when the details of this were emerging, I was doing a bit of press office cover for NHS Alliance, whose urgent and out-of-hours care lead Rick Stern is a director of the Primary Care Foundation, whose benchmarking tool the report will firmly endorse.

Hello again. Normal service is likely to be resumed hereafter. Today we have fresh Maynard Doctrine for you, with the good Professor launching into Clinical Excellence awards with righteous vigour. They do not emerge unscathed.

So, what the hell is going on more generally?

Why has David Cameron just performed a stonking great policy U-turn on cutting the deficit?

A biggie, that one (and leaving the field for the Lib Dems). But far from the only one.

Professor Alan Maynard OBE proposes changes to the vexed and vexing system of Clinical Excellence Awards.

The NHS is facing severe financial problems and the Department of Health requires the service to save and re-cycle £15-20 billion over the next three years.

At the same time as this edict from the Department of Stealth is being implemented, hospitals and PCTs across the country have been given their annual earmarked funding to finance clinical excellence awards (CEA).

Hello again. You want to know why I’ve been away for a bit? No, you don’t. Really. Frankly, I don’t want to know about it either.

It was because of stuff. Tedious, time-consuming anti-fun stuff. Four-letter-wording stuff. There we go.

Much has been up. Bill Moyes gave us a farewell interview - which you should read. He also gave one to (and the FT, and HSJ. The quality press, y'know.

At the end of January, Dr Bill Moyes steps down as executive chair of Monitor, the independent regulator of foundation trusts (FTs).

In this interview, Moyes reviews the financial challenges of austerity and a marginal tariff, and appraises the successes and challenges of the FT sector within the healthcare economy of 2010.

Financial matters

The party’s over: it is time to call it a day. After 60 years, there is a rising tide of attention being paid to changing clinical behaviour and measuring whether healthcare actually benefits the patient.

After a decade of generous indulgence with the Blair bonanza of increased NHS funding, the government has returned to that Thatcherite theme of demonstrable “value for money”. This change is occasioned not only by the recession (which shows little sign of reversing), but also by concerns about public sector productivity.

I am writing this perched on the side of a bath. This is a first for me. It's always good to do something new, isn't it? Athough it's not wildly comfortable, so this will be brief.

Context is all: we are in a beautiful Georgian farmhouse in the West Country. The bathroom in the roof conversion is the best chance for broadband signal. Yes, we got away through the snow and the ice, which was very beautiful.

As the song says, we live in a beautiful world. It's easy to forget that. I hope you don't and won't.

Much of the ‘ooof!’ in the OF – the NHS Operating Framework 2009-10 - had been correctly guessed or extensively leaked. So the zero growth in the tariff was no surprise (although the decision to keep 0% as a maximum growth for the following three years was perhaps less widely foreseen).