How successful it has been in reducing junior doctors' hours and improving their working conditions.

I established the New Deal Implementation Support Group (ISG) in September 1999 as a partnership arrangement with the Scottish Junior Doctors Committee of the British Medical Association (BMA) to work with NHSScotland Trusts in supporting their efforts to reduce hours of work for training grade staff. This work has been underpinned by the New Contract for Doctors in Training which introduced a contractual requirement for all Pre Registration House Officer (PRHO) posts to comply with the New Deal by 1 August 2001 and for Senior House Officer (SHO) and Specialist Register (SpR) posts by 1 August 2003. I recently announced that 97% of PRHO posts have now been declared by the ISG as New Deal compliant, which is a significant improvement on the 13% declared by the ISG in their March 2001 report. In particular, all PRHO grades training in the Glasgow area have been declared by junior doctors, trusts and the ISG as fully compliant with New Deal standards on hours of work and rest. The current position on compliance for SHO and SpR grades has yet to be confirmed. Completed returns from trusts are awaited, but trusts are aware of the August 2003 compliance deadline. It is anticipated returns will identify that progress has been made with these grades of doctors in training. In addition to the recruitment of an extra 100 junior doctors announced in June 2000, I also announced in April this year a commitment to employ 375 more junior doctors by 2003. This represents an increase of approximately 10% and I expect these additional resources to be used to best effect in targeting areas of hour's non-compliance. In relation to other issues such as accommodation, catering and security, UK national minimum standards have been agreed recently between the four UK Health Departments and the BMA. The ISG is currently in the process of undertaking visits to trusts to assess where variations from standards exist and to advise on necessary improvements. On completion of this assessment process, trusts will be invited to submit plans detailing how they are to address any shortfalls against standards and to submit on-going progress reports as appropriate to the Health Department on a six-monthly basis.