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The list, updated weekly, symbolises this minister's mission to raise standards and act as the "patients' champion". Yesterday, he was forced to address a looming winter crisis in Accident and Emergency departments with bailout funding for hospitals, but on this and other bones of contention in the health service, he is trying to develop a long-term reform plan. As he does so, spurred by the revelations of the Francis and Keogh reports, he is modelling himself on another man who spends a fair bit of time around whiteboards: Michael Gove.

This week, the chief nursing officer Jane Cummings said the new inspections would make it more difficult for a failing hospital to hide. Mr Hunt doesn't only want to make it more difficult for hospitals to hide: he is trying to encourage them to come into the open and be honest. At the bottom of the list of never events in his office is a line in red marker pen that reads "good hospitals report never events".

There will never come a day when the Health Secretary rubs his hands together with delight because the whiteboard opposite him is clear: the NHS is staffed by humans and many never events are a result of a chain of tiny errors that leads to catastrophe. But reporting those mistakes means a hospital can work out what went wrong and make changes.

Now Mr Hunt is deciding what will happen to those hospitals providing an unsatisfactory service. He is looking to the way Mr Gove and his New Labour predecessors turned around failing schools. An obvious way of emulating head boy Gove would be to copy the Education Secretary's academy super-heads, where entrepreneurs put their skills from other sectors into transforming schools.

One of Mr Gove's best-known tactics has been holding public showdowns with the teaching unions. He has annoyed the two largest of them, the NUT and NASUWT, so much that they have backed themselves into a corner by lashing out in a reflex at his every announcement. This makes them look ridiculous and they seem concerned only with the producers rather than consumers of education.

I understand that Mr Hunt doesn't plan quite the same sort of fight with health workers' unions, although he already has a vote of no confidence from the doctors' body, the British Medical Association, as a badge of honour. He's a less pugnacious figure than Mr Gove, in any case. "He's not spoiling for a fight," says a source close to the Health Secretary. "But, as for transparency and being honest about care, he's not going to give up on them."

Both men are more than happy to take the fight to Labour. The battle is bloodiest when it comes to health, as the party that created the NHS refuses to give any ground to the Tories. Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, has managed to drive Mr Hunt and colleagues round the bend by being the only effective political operator in Ed Miliband's shadow cabinet team.

Both Mr Hunt and Mr Burnham want to claim the NHS moral high ground in front of voters at the 2015 general election. If he is to succeed in this, the Health Secretary will need to take some playground fighting tips from head boy Gove, too.