New prime minister makes a clean sweep in health team

Gordon Brown used the word “change” eight times in his first brief speech outside number 10 as prime minister, and for the Department of Health it has been almost “all change.”

An almost completely new ministerial team enters the department, with Alan Johnson, the former education secretary, as secretary of state, and Sir Ara Darzi, professor of surgery at Imperial College and already the health department's surgical adviser, joining the House of Lords to be a junior health minister as part of the prime minister's “government of all the talents.”

Dawn Primarolo, the only minister to have served as long as Gordon Brown at the Treasury—as financial secretary up to 1999 and since then as paymaster general, having …