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Medical Academic Staff Committee report on the Doctors and Dentists Review Body 2007 uplift

May 2007

Summary of recommendations
The thirty-sixth report of the Doctors and Dentists Review Body was published on 1 March 2007 and its recommendations were accepted by the government. The review body recommended that a cash amount of £1,000 per annum be added to each point in the pay scale for consultants and staff and associate specialists. The review body recommended that and doctors in training should receive a £650 per annum increase. This was intended to mean that a doctor or dentist in training would also receive an increase of around £1,000 when multiplied by the mean current banding multiplier of 1.56.

The review body recommended that the value of CEAs, commitment awards, distinction awards or discretionary points remain at 2006-07 rates.

In commenting on clinical academics the report stated:

“We have commented in our previous reports that clinical academic staff are outside our remit and a matter for universities rather than the NHS. Nevertheless, we do take an interest in the effect that any shortfall in numbers may have on the ability of the NHS to train sufficient numbers of medical and dental staff. The BMA and the BDA both raised issues relating to clinical academics with us this year. We repeat our comments from previous years: we support the principle of pay parity between clinical academic staff and NHS clinicians, and we place importance on their being sufficient incentives for doctors and dentists to enter this field” (page 65)

In commenting on Clinical Academic GMPs the report stated:

“In our Thirty-Fifth Report, we recommended that local awards for academic GMPs should be made by the relevant local ACCEA committee and moderated centrally. This led the BMA to express concern to us that the £200,000 allocated to local CEAs for senior academic GMPs might be insufficient. ACCEA told us that the figure was based on 0.35 of a CEA per eligible academic GMP, but that it had only been able to estimate the number of such consultants and would welcome assistance in determining the number of eligible academic GMPs. We agree the necessity for accurate figures on the number of eligible academic GMPs and ask that the parties provide this data for the next pay round so that the basis of the CEA scheme is not undermined” (page 65)

Translation
Following the Government’s acceptance of the Review Body’s recommendations, the Association’s side of the Clinical Academic Staff Salaries Committee (CASSC) requested that the University and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) translate these NHS awards to the pay of clinical academic staff.

We highlighted to UCEA that although the Review Body recommended a £650 per annum increase for doctors and dentists in training, it also highlighted that as a result of the new contact’s incremental scales, junior doctors’ total earnings were decreasing as a result of the reduction in the numbers of hours works in order to achieve compliance with the European Working Time Directive. We highlighted that for academic trainees to have pay parity with NHS trainees they should receive a banding supplement for working any hours above 40 per week and for doing any out of hours work at the hospital. UCEA subsequently advised that Universities relied on trusts to provide them with accurate information about the appropriate banding supplements that should be added to junior academic salaries. For this reason we asked for a reminder that supplements should be applied in the update that UCEA would send to its subscribers. Although in the event we could not agree on an amended form of words for the update, we did agree that the Chairman of MASC and Profession Bill Wakeham Chairman of UCEA’s Clinical Academic Staff Advisory Committee should meet to discuss the specific issue of banding supplements.

The translation process for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will be set in train as soon as increases in pay for hospital doctors and dentists in the devolved administrations have been announced.

New pay scales
The new pay scales will be implemented in two stages, in April and November. The increases, as agreed with the BMA and shared to UCEA subscribers in April are reproduced in the attached Word document.