Tom Smith on today’s health policy debate.

Amongst today’s headlines includes the snappy, ‘super surgeries row rumbles on’ as well as the not so snappy, ‘Gordon Brown accuses doctors of ill founded allegations over polyclinics’. While many people will today be aware that the government has fallen out with doctors, they may still not be clear about why.

Tom Smith introduces a new daily analysis of health policy debate that will appear exclusively on Health Policy Insight at teatime each day.

While press summaries give readers a clue about the surface of debate our new summary aims to scratch beneath the surface and make sense of what is being discussed. It aims to set the reports in context and compare commentary across the British print and broadcast media. Each day the press is full of discussion about health policy, partly reflecting the current highly charged political atmosphere, but also a fair amount of uncertainty about the aims of policy, how different elements link together or don’t, and more crucially how policy should be taken forward and by whom.