In health we will focus on outcomes, including public health outcomes, instead of narrow process targets that distort clinical priorities.
"Targets tie the hands of doctors and nurses, forcing them to jump whenever Whitehall says so, and distort clinical priorities.
Jonathan Fielden, chair of the British Medical Association's consultants' committee, has said that PFI debts are "distorting clinical priorities" and impacting the treatment given to patients.
Clinical priorities were distorted - almost certainly costing lives - as urgent operations were delayed so people could have varicose veins removed before the 15-month deadline.
The health think-tank the King's Fund has shown that this is not being achieved by treating more patients ( that hasn't gone up), but by distorting clinical priorities.
The tougher Labour gets with these targets - which is what it is promising - the worse these distortions of clinical priorities will become.
Good care depends on doctors practicing with ethical and clinical priorities; bad care increases costs and suffering.
As with another government target the reduction of NHS waiting lists political symbolism is in danger of distorting clinical priorities.
The consultation response forms part of a submission to the clinical priorities advisory group, the body that it had been thought would make a decision on PrEP at its next meeting in June.
"And the opposition also appears blind to current pressures, and failing to learn from the past, in resurrecting a discredited 48-hour access target, which will force GPs into offering perverse appointment systems that distort clinical priorities.
NHS Change Day could well be the bottom-up reorganisation of clinical priorities essential to delivering high quality care, rather than top-down disjointed and ill-thought out NHS reforms which did not command the confidence of many professional organisations.
