Have physician associates done more harm than good? (The Times, 5 March 2026)

Summary

Physician Associates were supposed to ease doctor’s caseloads. Instead they’ve been accused of stealing jobs, confusing patients and failing to prevent at least four deaths. Are their days numbered? Dr Phil Whitaker gives his prognosis in this Times article.

Content

You’ve probably phoned your local surgery — or filled in the online form — only to be told the GP can’t fit you in, but a physician associate can see you. Or perhaps you’ve been to A&E and been assessed by a scrubs-clad “PA”, introducing themselves as “one of the medical team”. It’s better to be seen by somebody than nobody, you thought, and you trust the NHS to ensure you’ll be seen by someone qualified to help. Together, the words “physician” and “associate” at least sound reassuring.

Yet a series of revelations over the past three years, including four coroners’ reports into patient deaths, have raised serious concerns about the way the health service has deployed this type of NHS worker. Some in the medical profession are asking: should the job even exist at all?

Maryam Habib was on her way to the waiting room to collect her first patient of the morning when she spotted something odd on her consulting room door: someone had changed her job title. When she’d left for her summer holiday two weeks earlier the sign had identified her as a “physician associate”, as it had done for the three years she’d been working at her GP surgery in Manchester. Now her own door told her she was something else: a “physician assistant”.

The change wasn’t just cosmetic for Habib. She noticed that the appointment slots earmarked for her to assist the duty doctor with the day’s urgent workload had been blocked. She was also told by the practice manager that she was now banned from seeing anyone under the age of 16. Young patients she’d been working with for months, building rapport and trust, were abruptly transferred to an unfamiliar GP.

“For the first time I didn’t feel welcome in my workplace,” Habib, 27, tells me. “I felt like a lesser colleague.” She started to overthink every decision, feeling acutely vulnerable in case she put a foot wrong. “It went from 0 to 100 really quickly.”