To the new health secretary, Andrew Lansley, target is a dirty word. He prefers outcome measures – actual results that show treatments are working.

A brief period in which British family doctors were offered a financial inducement to treat diabetic patients more intensively could be coming to an end.
 

Reservations on today’s report by Nuffield Trust which compares funding and healthcare performance across the UK centre on: Rurality (which not even comparison between Scotland and North East England redresses), Reporting standards, Right measures, Responsiveness, and Repeat attendances.

Baroness Young has resigned as Chair of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) after reports of conflicts with Health Secretary Andy Burnham concerning procedures for monitoring the NHS.

Want to know how long you’ll have to wait in your local A&E? The NHS Information centre today published a report that uses Hospital Episode Statistics to compare how different trusts perform.

Latest data on mortality for common causes of death, published today, show progress on meeting most of the Department of Health mortality targets. But the way some of those targets were framed made success almost inevitable.

One in ten white boys is leaving school with fewer than five GCSEs, the benchmark for basic secondary school education, according to figures released by the Department for Children, Schools and Families in response to a Freedom of Information request.

Targets are usually well-meant. They're designed to inject a note of urgency into otherwise sluggish systems and raise productivity. But the outcome is seldom strictly what anybody intended.

Figures published today by the School Food Trust show that the Government’s target of increasing the take-up of school meals is going to be missed. Is this a failure? Yes and no.