UMAPS, the professional association for physician associates (PAs), regrets the votes announced by members of the Royal College of Physicians looking at the future role of PAs in the NHS at an Extraordinary General Meeting held on 13 March.
Stephen Nash, UMAPS Founder, said: “PAs are skilled, passionate and well-educated health professionals. We are committed to supplementing and improving the NHS workforce that helps doctors to best treat patients.
We fully recognise what our job entails with a long-established starting scope and subsequent training alongside our role caring for patients. We are more than ready to engage with fellow NHS staff, Medical Royal Colleges, the General Medical Council and employers to discuss the future roles of PAs, if this is what people want.”
Mr Nash added: “On the issue of junior doctor training everyone recognises this is less than perfect. But this is not the fault of PAs the conflation of these issues has been deliberate to obfuscate the role the accusers had in letting down their own members. We are being attacked relentlessly by extremists over the failings of their own training and remuneration scheme, but we did not design or implement this.”
“We also note that, as seen with the RCOA EGM, this has had an awful turn out of 32% and the moderate doctors have either boycotted or are apathetic to the extremist anti-MAP stance. Unfortunately, this has led to yet another denigrating EGM being passed against MAPs.”
“Regarding the vote to slow the roll-out in numbers of PAs, as we have said before, we are more than happy to contribute to a discussion on the scope of practice of PAs, but ultimately this is for the Government and the NHS to decide, not another group of health professionals. We regret that this motion succeeded and will now be used for the further denigration and discrimination of PAs in the workplace.”
Five motions were voted on. These were:
- Scope of practice
Physician associates are not doctors. They should not be regarded as replacements for doctors, and they should never replace a doctor on a rota. They are valued healthcare professionals who participate in patient care in addition to the rest of the wider multi-disciplinary team.
- Accountability
This EGM notes the current legal restrictions on who can prescribe medication or request ionising radiation and reminds all medically qualified membership categories of the College that they remain responsible for any such decisions by others that they may be asked to endorse.
- Evaluation
This EGM calls on the RCP to contribute actively to generating an evidence base and evaluation framework around the introduction of PAs, addressing (for example) clinical outcomes, cost effectiveness, safety, the patient experience, staff wellbeing and interrelationships, and implications for the healthcare workforce.
- Training opportunities
This EGM calls on the RCP to explore, document and address the impact on training opportunities of doctors resulting from the introduction of PAs.
- Caution in pace and scale of roll-out
In the initial request for this EGM, Fellows called on the RCP to pause the roll-out of PA roles. A pause is clearly not feasible given recent legislation. This EGM therefore calls on the RCP to limit the pace and scale of the roll-out until the medicolegal issues of regulation, standards and scope of practice are addressed.
