A doctor has been cleared of indecently exposing himself to colleagues at a Nottingham hospital.
Dr Adeniran Yesufu was accused of carrying out the acts at Nottingham City Hospital three times in late 2007 and early 2008.
A GMC fitness to practise panel decided eyewitness evidence did not prove that it was Dr Yesufu who was responsible.
Read more at BBC Health.
The proportion of consultant job posts in England offering fewer than 2.5 supporting professional activity (SPA) slots has nearly doubled in the past 20 months, show data from the BMA.
Its analysis of consultant posts advertised on the NHS Jobs website found that the proportion of jobs offering fewer than 2.5 SPAs rose from 28% to 47% between October 2009 and June 2011.
The consultant contract specifies that full time consultants should have 2.5 SPAs a week - 10 hours in a standard 40 hour week - to spend on developing and improving the quality of patient care. Any variation from this standard split should be agreed between the employer and the individual consultant when negotiating job plans.
“The time a consultant spends on SPAs is extremely valuable to employers; not only is it consultants remaining up to date, it’s also consultants doing teaching and training of the next generation of doctors and doing service development and audit to make sure they’re providing a high quality service,” said Paul Flynn, deputy chairman of the BMA’s consultants committee.
Read more at BMJ Careers.
I am struggling to equate the political direction over NHS pensions with any semblance of fairness.
True, hospital consultants are in a difficult position. Consultants are typically included amongst those described as ‘high earners’. But let’s take a look at the facts. After 12 to 15 years of training they begin a consultant career on £74,500 a year. It is only after 19 years that they reach the top of the scale at £100,400.
Relative to other professional classes this does not seem highly paid to me. The final salary figure could be higher were it not for the fact that their pay has been frozen for two years; take home pay has been further reduced by hefty increases in tax, National Insurance contributions and (guess what) pension contributions.
Estimates coming from the Treasury suggest that under Danny Alexander’s fair deal pension reform, consultants can expect to pay a further £3,600 in pension contributions every year and work longer to reap benefits far less than those promised when they joined the scheme.
Is this really fair? The government line is that pensions for those less well paid should be protected. In other words they should be subsidised by those earning more. This differential philosophy is akin to saying that those who earn less should therefore pay less for a gallon of petrol, a loaf of bread, a motor vehicle and its vehicle excise duty. These cost the same irrespective of income. So what’s the difference between any of these and a pension?
I do not disagree with Hamish Meldrum, chair of BMA council, who argued recently on the Today Programme that this pension reform is a stealth tax. But it is more, much more than that.
Pension contributions are proposed to increase according to salary - but the product being purchased is exactly the same. Simply put, the pension product provides 1/80ths or 1/60ths of salary per year worked. The differential contribution is manifestly unfair - the product is the same; it simply costs more if you are defined as a ‘high earner’.
To make matters worse these high earners only reach the top end of the salary scale towards the end of their careers - career average for them is quite different than career average for those whose salary is flat rate and not subject to threshold increases only once every five years.
The government may well be relying on the public mood, fuelled by misinformation and spin, that it is wrong for ‘high earners’ to reap high rewards at the tax payers’ expense. I think the public is more mature than that. The NHS scheme is in very healthy surplus, it was amended only three years ago in light of actuarial and Treasury forecasts, and passed the tests of fairness.
The public may not understand the finer points - but that will not mean that the public will be blind to the damage these pension reforms will have on their NHS.
NHS managers are abusing the system by making patients wait longer for treatment, the health secretary says.
Andrew Lansley was speaking out after a competition watchdog criticised the way non-emergency operations, such as knee and hip replacements, were being run.
The Co-operation and Competition Panel said some PCTs had introduced minimum waiting times to save money and level-down performance.
It said some patients were forced to go private or died before they got care.
The panel was unable to say how many places were adopting such practices and the report did not name any individual trusts.
It is also unclear what patients were dying from as the treatment they were waiting for was not life-saving care.
Read BBC Health.
The High Court has found against the BMA’s judicial review of NHS pension scheme rules which deny the widowers of female doctors the same rights as the widows of male doctors.
Currently service accrued by female NHS workers before 6 April 1988 does not count towards the pension entitlements of their widowers. A female widow receives a pension based on all contributions.
The judicial review - that concluded last week - had been brought by BMA lawyers on behalf of GP widower Ian Cockburn who receives £3,200 a year less than a female widow in a similar position would receive. His wife, a Warwickshire GP who died of cancer in 2007, contributed to the NHS pension scheme for 24 years.
The BMA accused the government of unlawful discrimination over paying the widower of a female doctor a lower pension. Lawyers for the health secretary accepted that it is discrimination but argued it was defensible. The government claimed that if the BMA position is upheld it will lead to the Treasury having to find a further £4bn.
Dr Hamish Meldrum, chairman of BMA council, said: “It’s unfair that female members of the NHS pension scheme do not have the same rights as men. We’re disappointed that this sexual discrimination couldn’t be stopped in the High Court, but we will continue to highlight it, and to fight for fair pensions for all doctors.”
The BMA was given permission for a High Court judicial review of widowers’ pensions last October as part of its long-running campaign against pay discrimination in the NHS.
The BMA, in conjunction with its legal team, is now considering an application for permission to appeal.
Alex Fox, a partner at law firm Manches and the BMA’s legal representative, said: “It is important for organisations such as the BMA to ensure that unlawful discrimination within the work place is stamped out”.
The Department of Health’s response is that it was appropriate and justified to allow the discrimination for those NHS employees aged over 55 because women occupy a disadvantaged economic position, owing to childcare responsibilities and their historically lower earning potential.
Government ministers have, however, removed the comparable discriminatory effect from a small number of public sector schemes, including one which affects MPs.
A low glycaemic index (GI) diet may hold the key to controlling blood glucose levels and achieving and maintaining sustained weight loss in patients with Type 2 diabetes. Recent research indicates that the type of carbohydrates we eat may have a greater impact on weight gain and glycaemic control than previously thought.
Low-GI food ingredients, developed in close collaboration between food technologists, nutritionists and physicians, is a growing market and may alter the way Type 2 diabetes is managed in the near future.
Professor Jeya Henry is director of the Functional Food Centre at Oxford Brookes University, a facility at the forefront of the research into modulating blood glucose and controlling body weight with the help of a low-GI diet.
Read more.
Researchers report that, for rates of revascularisation at one year, drug-eluting stents (DES) appear to be superior to bare metal stents (BMS) in saphenous vein graft lesions.
The results of the ISAR-CABG (Efficacy Study of Drug-eluting and Bare Metal Stents in Bypass Graft Lesions) study were presented recently at the ACC.
“Out to 12 months, the need of revascularisation was reduced by about half with drug-eluting stents compared to bare metal stents, and, for safety parameters, drug-eluting stents were comparable to bare metal stents for stent thrombosis, death or myocardial infarction,” said presenter and investigator Julinda Mehilli, director of clinical research and data coordinating in the Intracoronary Stenting and Antithrombosis Research Centre (ISAR) at the German Heart Centre in Munich, Germany.
The multi-centre, randomised study was the largest to-date comparing DES to BMS in the saphenous vein.
Read more.
It is with regret that I have to announce the death of Robert Ettinger. “Who?” I hear you cry. The man who invented cryonics.
As a child I was obsessed with his particularly bonkers field of research, freezing the rich, so that they can be re-animated in the future. His corpse has now joined the 200 or so, predominantly stored in either the US or Russia.
Some of those wanting cryostasis, could only afford to have their heads saved - think Nixon in Futurama. These bodies are preserved at around minus 200 degrees celcius, in giant thermos flasks. Maybe I’m being unfair to imply that this is just for the rich, but how many of us would waste over $200,000 on a bet with extremely long odds on winning?
With his ‘never say death, say cryostasis’ optimism, Ettinger created a not so hi-tech facility for storing his collection of corpses. You can see some photos here. My particular favourite is perfusion-kit-in-a-suitcase, sitting in front of the fire and the telly.
Even when I was 14, and read his original work, The Prospect Of Immortality, I could see that Ettinger was, how can I put it nicely, a NUTJOB. Bizarrely, one of the highest concentrations of takers for the scheme is in Peacehaven, hordes of men and women running from the bowling green, asking where to sign for this complete nonscience.
Here are the fundamental flaws…
Surely for cryonics to work you would have to have your cellular fluid replaced antemortem, so you would have to murder your clients.
Why bother resurrecting a decrepit 92-year-old, who is just going to peg it immediately?
If you’ve just had your head frozen with the hope of uploading your personality to a future body donor, wouldn’t you wait until the technology was ready for you to download it first.
Come to mention it, whose body would you be planning on snatching?
Surely in 2011 the technology to clone you would be a better investment. Why would we want to wake up to a world filled with Sussex blue rinses? And most importantly - how long can you leave a leg of lamb in the freezer before it gets freezer burn?
The first ‘client’ of Ettinger’s was his mother, followed by his two wives. Both wives??? I hope for his sake the technology doesn’t work, it could get very messy.
The consequences of saving someone’s life are profound, though sometimes a little obscure.
Dr Michael Rigby is a consultant paediatric cardiologist at the Royal Brompton Hospital and in the course of his work successfully treated the daughter of musician Elio Pace, when she was just a few days old.
It saved her life and Elio was determined to recognise Dr Rigby’s contribution in some way. After much persistence, Dr Rigby agreed to a ‘thank you’ in the shape of piano lessons.
He had trained to grade 5 in classical piano but wanted to learn boogie-woogie. It turned out to be Elio’s forte, and now Dr Rigby is rather good at it. So good, in fact, that they did their first gig recently to raise funds for the hospital.
“Considering he is such a talented musician, when it comes to teaching, he has a wonderful ability to keep things simple and make it fun. I never forget his tips and advice,” Dr Rigby says.
The good doctor might even support Elio on his forthcoming nationwide tour in September.
Now that’s how to hit a heart warming ‘thank you’ note….(sorry).
The Treasury has proposed significant increases in the pension contributions of higher earning NHS staff.
NHS staff representatives have responded with the following statement to the Department of Health’s formal consultation on the imposition of higher pension contributions across the workforce in 2012/13:
“These proposals have been formulated without the agreement of NHS staff side, who do not view the proposals as legitimate. An equivalent consultation could have emerged from the cost sharing approach to funding the NHS Pension Scheme which was agreed in partnership in 2007. This approach would most likely have led to a requirement to increase contributions or amend benefit structures and the NHS Staff Side would have participated fully in any resulting discussions and consultation emerging from this process. Unfortunately this agreed procedure has been unilaterally dismantled by government.
“We have not and still do not accept the Treasury’s rationale for imposed contribution increases which have been devised to counteract the effects of the financial crisis caused by reckless risk taking in the banking sector. The contention that these contributions are necessary to pay for increased longevity is false; this cost pressure is identified in the cost sharing agreement under which NHS employees (not taxpayers) would stand to pick up the cost of living longer. In essence this is simply a tax on hard working and loyal health service workers.
“Furthermore, NHS staff side questions the legitimacy of this consultation given that so much is unknown about future reforms. It is clear that government still expects to impose further contribution increases in 2013 and 2014 and that these should prevail following government proposals to reduce benefits planned to be implemented in 2015. Given that members face so many unknowns about the future of their pension scheme, it is difficult to see how they can take a considered view on this imposed change. It will be extremely difficult for unions to consult members over these proposals when they will not know the possible increases in contributions due in 2013 and 2014 and before we have even started negotiations on possible further reforms of the NHS scheme, it does seriously undermine those negotiations and once again calls into question the sincerity of government ministers.
“NHS staff side will consider the views of their constituents and attempt to engage with the Department of Health, where possible, throughout this process. We will keep members informed of any developments”.
