This has been a busy year for the NHS.

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Click here for details of 'Forward, the information-light brigade! In praise of Simon Burns', the new issue of subscription-based Health Policy Intelligence.

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Over this past twelve months, we’ve seen:
• breast and bowel cancer screening – expanding ahead of schedule,
• MRSA down 17% - C.diff down 15%,

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley – Speech to the NHS Confederation conference, Manchester Thursday 7 July 2011

Check against delivery

Thank you Sarah, and thanks to Mike and all the team at the NHS Confederation for inviting me to be with you today.

It’s great to be here with you in Manchester, where the NHS was born 63 three years ago at Trafford General Hospital, under what many people now accept was a Coalition Government, led by a Conservative former Prime Minister.

I mean, the great Winston Churchill didn’t lose his seat in 1945.

(Video footage of the speech will be available through this link.)

I forget about things, which is one way of making life more exciting.

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Click here for details of 'Forward, the information-light brigade! In praise of Simon Burns', the new issue of subscription-based Health Policy Intelligence.

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The excellent Guardian Politics LiveBlog main man Andrew Sparrow cleverly picked out the bones of Andrew Lansley's Commons statement in response to the Dilnot report on social care and its funding.

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Click here for details of 'Forward, the information-light brigade! In praise of Simon Burns', the new issue of subscription-based Health Policy Intelligence.

Irwin Brown of the Socialist Health Association welcomes the advent of Market Stalinism to the NHS.

I was worried and even more confused when I read the latest amendments to the revised, revised Bill.

No longer – I have seen the light.

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Health Policy Intelligence is our weekly subscription-based analysis service.

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Links to yesterday's sessions of the Bill Committee are here and here.

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Click here for details of ''Forward, the information-light brigade! In praise of Simon Burns', the new issue of subscription-based Health Policy Intelligence.

The micro-blogging website Twitter, where I am to be found as @HPIAndyCowper, is proving itself a useful and amusing medium for micro-sized, 140-character-limited, health policy conversations.

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Click here for details of 'Forward, the information-light brigade! In praise of Simon Burns', the new issue of subscription-based Health Policy Intelligence.

Words cannot do justice to the sheer surrealism of the recommitted Health Bill committee evidence session yesterday.

Fortunately, the wonderful people who do Hansard have the transcript of the morning session available here, and of the afternoon session here.

Thank you, Hansard people. You are lovely.