Andy burnham

The sword of truth is working overtime this afternoon. First, Andy Burnham writes a letter to David Cameron demanding answers about a £21,000 donation from John Nash, chairman of CareUK, to the office of, oh dear, Andrew Lansley. As Paul Waugh notes, a conflict of interest scandal looms here because CareUK is a private firm that makes £400m running GP surgeries and so forth for the NHS. But the truth will out as they say. It turns out that the Chairman of BUPA, Lord Leitch, wasted £5,000 on Gordon Brown’s unopposed leadership campaign. BUPA also does rather well out of the NHS. The indefatigable Waugh has dug up this gem from a speech Leitch made to the Lords: 'When we debate healthcare in the UK, all too often the focus is on the NHS alone.

More evidence today that the TUC is dictating government policy on public services. Nick Timmins in the FT notes that Andy Burnham’s new guidance to health authorities requires them to treat NHS organisations as the “preferred providers” of care, reversing the Blair/Milburn reforms which opened up health care to private suppliers. By insisting that NHS providers have ‘at least two chances to improve’ before failing services are put out to tender, and that NHS staff should have the opportunity to bid not just once but twice for any new service contracts, Burnham is effectively excluding private providers from the process. It’s no surprise that Unison welcomes the move as a ‘significant policy shift.’ No word yet from Andrew Lansley.

I am instinctively sceptical about health scare stories, so have been watching the Swine Flu story with much suspicion. We are seldom reminded that it's less serious than normal flu. Hysterically, Andy Burnham claims there could be up to 100,000 infections a day in Britain next month - the latest worldwide tally is 121,000. We are told how many die from swine flu, but not how many have also died from normal flu so we can put it in context (the DoH, remarkably, can't tell me).   Proper diagnosis is not being done by our doctors. Virtually anyone with a summer cold is being told to stay at home for seven days - result! - and prescribed Tamiflu just in case.  I went hunting for the normal flu figures, but found something else instead: that this is a London flu.