The mystery of where recently departed University College London Hospitals chief executive Charles Marshall has gone has been solved. Despite wild rumours he was to replace North Thames regional director Ron Kerr, it turns out Mr Marshall is to join the ranks of exNHS managers turned management consultants.

He is, he tells Monitor, setting up his own healthcare consultancy and expects to be active in about a week's time. But why leave the London trust now? Mr Marshall says he went there five-and-a-half years ago with two aims in mind: to sort out the 'financial mess' the trust was in and get ministerial approval for development plans for the trust. 'It was always my intention to move on when those things were secured.' So could he at least be doing some work for North Thames or the Executive in future? Mr Marshall is guarded, saying: 'I do not talk about my clients.'

Meanwhile, changes at Manchester University's health services management unit continue to fascinate. But it is nonsense to suggest that Angela Schofield's part-time appointment as managing director of Dearden Management will cause a conflict of interest under the unit's new leadership, which is expected to give a greater push to the research and development agenda. Dearden and the unit may well have formally linked up and be intent on pursuing joint projects, but Ms Schofield, a senior fellow of HSMU and its head of integrated care and quality, will continue with all her research work, she tells Monitor.

Funny how the mind plays tricks. Though Dobbo and Co have mastered the art of making every announcement at least three times, the widely held belief that this has prompted the DoH press office into Stakhanovite efforts appears not to be borne out by the facts. In its final 12 months, the Dorrell regime put out 394 press releases, and would no doubt have added a few more had ministers not been severely restricted in their use of the press office once the election was called. In the 11 months since the old firm changed hands, there have been 414 releases - a few more than before, but certainly not the flood it seems when you are on the receiving end. It doesn't even stack up against other departments. By early March, the DoH had put out 84 releases so far this year against 129 from David Blunkett's education department, 180 from John Prescott's environment department, and a record-breaking 181 from Margaret Beckett's Department of Trade and Industry. Still, there's a few weeks yet to the first anniversary.

Finally, Monitor would love to join in the debate posed by discussion paper no 5/97 issued by Aberdeen University's health economics research unit. But first could someone please translate the title: Using a Conditioned Iterative Generalised Least Squares estimator (CIGLS) to model a multilevel cost function and a discount function applied to repeated observations ?