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The facts about ‘assistant doctors’
The facts about ‘assistant doctors’
Labeled as doctors on the cheap, doctor assistants would attend intensive training for 2 years instead of the usual 7 years which doctors are required to complete.
The idea is that it will help take the strain of the NHS and that it will take reduce the current strain quickly. The NHS is incredibly strained in several ways and resources (and doctors) is sometimes limited.
The physician associates as they are being labelled, will have two years of intensive training instead of the seven of education, training and hands on experience completed by fully qualified and licensed doctors. The associates will provide support in several particular areas including diagnosis and patient management in hospitals.
Some patients' groups have warned that it may result in health services being provided "on the cheap". There are also other issues raised by patient groups, for example they have raised the issue that patients may not be able to tell the difference between the doctor assistants and fully qualified doctors.
Jeremy Hunt who is the health secretary, has commented: "The NHS is treating record numbers of people. That's why we are growing the workforce further with a new class of medic so busy doctors have more time to care for patients.
"I hope this will give a generation of talented graduates a gateway into medicine so they can contribute to our world-leading NHS. It will also give NHS staff a new route for career development."
The British Medical Association (BMA) has warned that the new posts should not and could not replace doctors. The chairman of the BMA, Mark Porter has said that although the concept could be useful if it is implemented correctly, the Department of Health needed to understand it’s limitations and needed to be clear on how the process should work.
Mark Porter said: "Only doctors can provide certain types of care, so the government needs to ensure that standards won't be affected by these changes and the quality of patient care will be protected.”
There are currently already 200 physician associates who work for the NHS and the Department of Health (DoH) unfortunately believes they are having very little impact on doctors' workloads. The Department of Health wants to increase the numbers on-going hoping that by doing so it will have a bigger impact.
The DoH is going to double the number of training places from 105 to 225, but according to the Guardian article the Department “was unable to say how many new physician associates would be drafted in, because their recruitment was down to individual hospitals”.