Editor’s Choice NHS 2025: a wobbly triadic stool and a gig economy Kamran Abbasi, Editor in Chief BMJ 2025; 391 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r2437 (Published 20 November 2025) Cite this as: BMJ 2025;391:r2437 The NHS sits seventh on the list of the world’s largest employers, rubbing shoulders with the armies of China, India, and the US, as well as mega-corporations. It’s also part of the “gig economy.” This is what an investigation into the data, testimonies, and analysis of the fate of locally employed doctors (LEDs) reveals in this week’s BMJ (doi: 10.1136/bmj.r2383) although it may sound like a fantastical claim. From being a bipartisan enterprise of patient partnership, clinical care is now a triadic one: a three-legged stool of clinician, patient, and AI algorithm. However, each one of the stool’s legs is insecure. AI is poorly regulated, being driven by profit and commercial opportunity. The patient’s voice was sidelined during the covid pandemic and is missing from the conversation about implementing AI in clinical care. While the proven benefits of patient involvement are underplayed in this triadic world, the unproven benefits of AI are rapidly adopted. The third insecure leg is a workforce barely able to meet demand in a world of professional erosion. News Worrying exodus of internationally qualified doctors, GMC warns Gareth Iacobucci BMJ 2025; 391 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r2432 (Published 21 November 2025) Cite this as: BMJ 2025;391:r2432 Hardening of anti-immigrant rhetoric in society could drive more foreign doctors away from a “less welcoming” UK, the General Medical Council warns. Its warning comes as new data show an increasing number of internationally trained medical graduates leaving the UK health workforce. A continuation of this trend would create “huge holes” in the NHS workforce that the service would struggle to fill, the GMC said. Doctors who qualified in other countries currently make up just under half (around 42%) of the UK medical workforce. News Sixty seconds on. art galleries and health Jacqui Wise BMJ 2025; 391 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r2412 (Published 18 November 2025) Cite this as: BMJ 2025;391:r2412 Picassos on prescription? Maybe they should be. Looking at art in galleries produces measurable benefits for health and wellbeing, according to new research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience at King’s College London. Meditate at the Tate? The study actually took place at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Fifty volunteers aged 18-40 viewed either original artworks or reproductions of the same paintings in a matched, non-gallery environment.… Editorial Ending nuclear weapons, before they end us Chris Zielinski https://doi.org/10.1136/heartjnl-2025-326383 This May, the World Health Assembly (WHA) will vote on re-establishing a mandate for the WHO to address the health consequences of nuclear weapons and war. Health professionals and their associations should urge their governments to support such a mandate and support the new United Nations (UN) comprehensive study on the effects of nuclear war. The first atomic bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert 80 years ago, in July 1945. Three weeks later, two relatively small (by today’s standards), tactical-size nuclear weapons unleashed a cataclysm of radioactive incineration on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the end of 1945, about 213 000 people were dead. Tens of thousands more have died from late effects of the bombings. Last December, Nihon Hidankyo, a movement that brings together atomic bomb survivors, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its ‘efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again’. Nine states jeopardise all humanity and the biosphere by claiming an exclusive right to wield the most destructive and inhumane weapons ever created. The world desperately needs the leaders of these states to freeze their arsenals, end the modernisation and development of new, more dangerous nuclear weapons, and ensure that new technology such as artificial intelligence can never trigger the launch of nuclear weapons. The UN scientific panel and a renewed mandate for WHO’s work in this area can provide vital authoritative and up-to-date evidence for health and public education, evidence-based advocacy and policies and the mobilised public concern needed to trigger decisive political leadership. This is a core health imperative for all of us.
Suman Bhandari (Wed,) studied this question.