Last month the BMA and the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association said they would put a pay offer to consultants in England after negotiations with the government.1The offer is 4.95% investment in pay for this financial year, in addition to the 6% pay uplift for 2023-24 that was announced by the government in July.2 Of this investment, 1.5% comes from phasing out local clinical excellence awards. If the offer is accepted the changes will come into force in January 2024 but will be paid retrospectively in April.Under the offer, most consultants will receive an additional uplift of between 2.85% and 12.8%, depending on their pay point (table 1). However, consultants in their fifth to eighth year of work will not receive an additional pay uplift immediately but will benefit from faster pay progression.bmj;383/dec01_10/p2851/TBL1T1tbl1Table 1What’s happening on doctors’ pay across the UKEnglandWalesScotlandNorthern IrelandConsultantsA deal offering up to 12.8% for 2023-24 is...

General practitioners in Scotland have rejected a call for a “move to a fully salaried GP service” with similar terms and conditions to hospital consultants, saying that this would lead to a loss of flexibility and continuity of care.Proposing a motion at the conference of Scottish local medical committees on 1 December in Clydebank,1 Andrew Forder, a GP from Lothian Local Medical Committee, said that the Scottish government had failed to fully deliver the 2018 GP contract and that general practice was still in a “perilous state” six years later.“Workload is still unsustainable, morale is still low, and practices are still struggling . . . We need to recognise the danger of the current situation and urgently look for an escape route,” said Forder, adding that the independent contractor model was “no longer fit for purpose.”He said, “I think there’s no question that the independent contractor model is a beautiful...

WoofDown boy, although I can understand your excitement. New research says a dog can reduce the risk of developing dementia in old age.Lassie?Any dog. Dog ownership has a suppressive effect on incident disabling dementia, according to the study published in Preventive Medicine Reports.1 The researchers claim this is the first time that scientists have established a clear link between owning a dog and the onset of dementia.What do the labs say?The scientists from the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute for Geriatrics and Gerontology spent four years monitoring 11 194 adults aged 64 to 84—around 10% of the older population of Ota City, Tokyo. They concluded that dog owners were 40% less likely to get dementia than those without. “Having a dog effectively requires people to get into the habit of physical activity and that makes it much more likely that they will then have interactions and socialise with other people,” Yu Taniguchi,...

Ministers have launched a new surveillance system to quickly identify emerging methods of suicide as part of an effort to clamp down on those seeking to sell dangerous products to vulnerable people.The system will use near to real time data1 from police forces across England showing deaths by suspected suicide by gender, age group, and method.The new system, which is backed by the National Police Chiefs’ Council, is designed to support the pledge in the government’s national suicide prevention strategy to reduce the suicide rate in England within two and a half years.2Until now, the only national data available on suicide were from the Office for National Statistics, which could take up to two years to report. Under the new system data will be received from individual police forces in England and the government will get it within three months of a suspected suicide.Mental health minister Maria Caulfield said, “Every...

A “substantial pivot” is needed to get the fight against malaria back on track after a pause in progress, the World Health Organization has warned.1There were an estimated 249 million malaria cases globally in 2022—16 million more than in 2019 (233m)—said WHO in its annual malaria report. On top of the disruption caused by the covid-19 pandemic, the global response to malaria has been threatened by drug and insecticide resistance, humanitarian crises, and resource constraints, it said.WHO has called for “increased resourcing, strengthened political commitment, data driven strategies, and innovative tools” in order to make progress towards its goal of reducing global malaria incidence and mortality by at least 90% by 2030.2Climate changeIn the report, WHO also warned about the “threat of climate change,” highlighting that changes in temperature, humidity, and rainfall can impact the behaviour and survival of the malaria carrying Anopheles mosquito.It said that extreme weather events, such...