Days like this

Cook keeps distance - BMA pay plan fury- Bevan nephew backs Tories- Receptionists 'snooty'- Hospital cop installed- Managers' reprieved

Shadow health secretary Robin Cook has distanced his party from threats to sack NHS managers after an election victory.He denied a campaign to victimise those working to make the most of the internal market reforms.One prospective candidate had told a manager a Labour government could deem him to have 'contributed to his own redundancy'.

Plans to introduce performance-related pay for 50,000 hospital doctors could prove unfair, unworkable and undermine clinical judgement, the British Medical Association claims. It doubts whether the criteria used to reward managers could be applied to clinicians, whose achievements it says are more difficult to judge.

Aneurin Bevan's nephew, Bristol neurosurgeon Huw Griffith, has helped launch the Conservative Party's election campaign on health by claiming his uncle would have backed the internal market reforms.Other members of the Bevan family said they were 'horrified'by his remarks.

Receptionists at GP surgeries can be like SS officers or the Spanish Inquisition, according to a survey in Northumberland.

Half the patients questioned said that service from receptionists was good, but others described them as 'rude and snooty'and 'miserable and grumpy'.

The first uniformed police officer to be stationed on hospital premises is to take up his post at Sheffield's Royal Hallamshire Hospital.At nearby Nether Edge Hospital, a police sub-station has cut petty crime from 47 incidents to two or three in nine months.

Managers at East Birmingham Hospital, where MPs described treatment of a terminally ill man as 'an appalling indictment of 20th-century Britain', are to keep their jobs.NHS chief executive Duncan Nichol said disciplining staff was best left to 'local parties', and action had been taken against nurses involved.