The number one medical specialty to appear on the New Year's Honours list in the last decade is public health medicine, according to research published today in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM). But, like other doctors, they will have to work for over 30 years before being recognised. The study aimed to establish which specialties were more likely to be honoured, and how long doctors needed to practise before an honour is conferred.

The public may have an over-optimistic impression of survival and neurological outcome after cardiac arrest because newspapers tend to report success stories. Good news might be unusual in newspapers but when it comes to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) the opposite applies, according to the results of new research published this month in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM).

Despite being criticised in the past for a lack of balance, the latest information provided by the NHS Breast Screening Programme (NHS BSP) continues to misinform, say the authors of a report in the latest issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM).

A new analysis, published in the latest issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, shows that the additional NHS spending after 1999 resulted in better health outcomes when measured using the concept of "amenable mortality", an indicator proposed for routine use by the current government. Professor Martin McKee, one of the paper's authors, comments, "Using the coalition government's chosen measure of health outcomes, it is clear that the increased funding of the NHS in England and Wales under their predecessors made a real difference to health."

Older patients are far more likely to suffer harm from a medical misadventure* and are fifty times more likely to die from such an error than are patients aged fourteen or under. While this may be partly explained by the fact that older people undergo many more procedures and are more likely to have other medical complications, further research is needed to find out why they are at such a far higher risk of avoidable injury when undergoing hospital treatment.

The NHS could save millions of pounds if it made better use of hypnosis for a wide range of common conditions, says the Hypnosis and Psychosomatic Medicine Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. But patients need to be protected from inadequately qualified practitioners, who cause harm and end up costing the NHS more.

A paper published in the latest issue of the journal Clinical Risk concludes that the NHS Litigation Authority (NHSLA) should do far more to ensure lessons are learned by the NHS from the claims brought against it.

The British Menopause Society is calling for GP practices to contact all female patients on their 50th birthday with an invitation to register for a "health and lifestyle consultation to discuss a personal health plan for the menopause and beyond."

Professor Sir Michael Rawlins, the current Chairman of NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) has been elected as the next President of the Royal Society of Medicine.

The number of coroner autopsies carried out every year in England and Wales could be reduced by over 60% - or 80,000 dissections – if a system of post-mortem examinations used in Scotland was adopted, say the authors of a paper published in the January issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

The authors, led by Professor Derrick Pounder, of the Centre for Forensic and Legal Medicine at the University of Dundee, argue that external examinations are a more cost-effective and less intrusive system for identifying cause of death.