Plan to pump 10,000 fake doctors into the NHS is insane and dangerous

You might not have heard of a ‘physician associate’ - and that’s not your fault. They probably won’t tell you. A physician associate walks and talks like a doctor, but they are no replacement for one.

To become a physician associate you need to complete a two-year postgraduate course or three-year apprenticeship. But despite much less learning than the five years a junior doctor must undergo to be qualified, they are often paid more than them.

Which is why the government’s plan to flood the NHS with 10,000 more of them over the next 15 years doesn’t make any sense. There’s certainly no money-saving aspect. This is simply another corner-cutting exercise to quickly plug gaps in a struggling NHS that will put patients at risk.

Far from saving doctors work (their original purpose), they often create more. Physician associates are unregulated so cannot be held accountable for their mistakes, meaning doctors must recheck any critical decisions they make. Critical decisions are made quite frequently in hospitals.

But they’re not just overstretching doctors and creating more work; they’re harming patients. A recent Daily Mail investigation has found brain bleeds misdiagnosed as inconsequential headaches and lung disease mistaken for a chest infection.

Doctors say they are “increasingly concerned” by this.

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Source: LBC, 16 October 2023