General Medical Council CEO has no medical training – but tells qualified medics they’re wrong about patient safety
The General Medical Council (GMC) chief executive has responded to a document from the Royal College of Anaesthetists (RCA) on patient safety under a new government cost-cutting scheme by telling them he and his fellow non-medical management thinks the RCA is being ‘insufficiently flexible’. Mr Massey reportedly has no medical training at all.
The Starmer government is eagerly pursuing the plan introduced by the Tories to increase the number of ‘medical associate’ roles – particularly ‘physician associates’ (PAs) and ‘anaesthetist associates’ (AAs) – used in the NHS instead of having more doctors, even though the associates do not have medical training, are sporadically supervised at best and are only required to complete a two-year course instead of the five to ten years for fully trained doctors. Trusts have autonomy over how to use these roles with no national standard and a survey found ‘deeply disturbing’ patterns in the way the roles were being used beyond their scope. Several patients have already died as a result of misdiagnoses by PAs.
The use of PAs, which is considered by nine out of ten doctors to be dangerous to patients and confuses many patients, who do not realise that they have not been seen and treated by a fully-qualified medic, is being pushed by the government as a way of ‘downskilling’ the NHS, reducing costs and allowing increased profits for private providers, under the guise of the so-called ‘NHS Workforce Plan’ as part of the ‘Integrated Care Systems’ (ICS) project. The increased focus on associate training is also sucking away resources and training and professional development time fully-qualified doctors need.
ICS, formerly called ‘Accountable Care Organisations’ (ACOs) after the US system it copied, were renamed after awareness began to spread that ACOs were a system for withholding care from patients and that care providers were incentivised to cut care because they receive a share of the ‘savings’. The system remained the same, but the rebranding disguised the reality.
The last Tory government used a ‘statutory instrument’ (SI) to pass the changes to avoid proper parliamentary scrutiny with the assistance of Starmer’s ‘opposition’, but both the Tories and Keir Starmer’s Labour support these and other measures to cheapen the NHS for the slash-burn-and-ration privatisation that Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said he plans to extend, warning the NHS that he will let it die if it does not submit to his ‘reforms’. Self-diagnosis and treatment are among Streeting’s planned reforms – but the increasing switch from doctors to PAs and AAs is central to them.
The British Medical Association (BMA) and ‘Anaesthetists United‘ are taking legal action against the GMC, which has previously only regulated fully-qualified doctors, over its readiness to help the government’s PA/AA plan by regulating the new roles as well – and has called on Starmer’s government to confirm it will not cover the GMC’s legal costs out of public funds. Starmer and Streeting, both of whom have accepted large donations from private medical interests, have not yet given this undertaking.
And now the RCA has sent the GMC its ‘draft anaesthesia associate scope of practice guidance’, laying out how, in its expert and medically-qualified opinion, AA roles must be used if the GMC and government press ahead with the planned expansion of their use and the GMC’s CEO – not a doctor – has replied advising the medical specialists that they’re being too rigid:
The RCA told the GMC that the scope of use of AAs needs to be much more carefully controlled and regulated to ensure patient safety. CEO Massey’s response? The specialists are being ‘insufficiently flexible’ and might ‘unnecessarily limit’ the way that NHS trusts use the ‘associates’:
And when the expert anaesthetists said the guidance must put a duty on trusts to make sure the training needs of fully-trained doctors are not neglected in favour of associates, Massey told them they were getting too big for their boots and that ‘plac[ing] requirements on employers’ is ‘go[ing] beyond their remit’:
The reaction of actual doctors to an unqualified managerial with a history degree telling the medical experts what they should and should not be demanding was unequivocal:
The government’s own analysis acknowledges that the increased use of PAs and AAs poses a ‘serious’ risk to patients. Tragically for all who rely on the NHS Starmer, Streeting and their cronies are fully committed to it as part of the downgrading, fragmentation and privatisation they plan for our health service – and the UK ‘mainstream’ media are all but ignoring the dangers.
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Who would allow an ‘Associate Anaesthetist’ anywhere near them – I bloody wouldn’t! But no doubt pressure would be brought to bear :
“Oh sorry, no qualified anaesthatist available at the moment. if you don’t accept this appointment then I’m afraid you will have to go to the back of the queue and wait another ……months/years”.
Some poor desperate sucker would no doubt accept the appointment with all the risks entailed with a not fully qualified anaesthetist.
The fact that the CEO of the GMC has no medical training says it all.
The 17s video clip of Laura Pidcock has been removed from Wes Streeting’s tweet of 5 y a. But the full 8+ minute video from when Streeting, Duffield et al smeared Laura Pidcock is still there on YouTube. Useful.
Well said, Julia. Patient Safety. The red wing of the Single Transferable Party (‘Labour’) is “blurring of lines” that leaves patients not knowing whether their ‘medical professional’ is a 5+year trained ‘doctor’ or a 2-year trained ‘assistant’.
* 9% of full time GPs and hospital doctors have left the NHS since the orchestrated covid ’emergency’ (2020) and cite this and enforced ‘vaccination’ with experiemtental, un-tested, un-needed and possibly dangerous mRNA-changing ‘vaccines’ as the reasons.
* Starmer’s Streeting (not a blue tory health sec) decided the GMC should regulate both proper doctors and the ‘assistants’ and refers to both groups as ‘medical professionals’. This is intentional “blurring of roles and status” and will confuse and endanger patients.
* The BMA and Anaesthetists United ( https://anaesthetistsunited.com/ ) are re-considering legal action and strikes to escalate this issue because ‘Labour’ is intentionally intensifying this crisis by out-torying the tories on it.
* Patients need to be informed of this de-skilling and down-grading of healthcare – but obviously, the controlled MSM, BBC/Channel4, et al, will probably play no major part in this except to misinform and disorientate patients.
Credit to Steve Walker and Skwawkbox for reporting this ongoing attempt to disable healthcare and privatise the NHS by the red wing of the Single Transferable Party.
Sounds like a ‘Cheap and Nasty ‘ policy
Red Tories Blue Tories Red Tories Blue Tories Red Tories Blue Tories
Off-topic and apologies for the grauniad link..
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/07/just-stop-oil-activist-gaie-delap-facing-jail-recall-as-wrists-too-small-for-electronic-tag
This poor arl’ girl has just been arrested and is on her way back to jail – because the MoJ haven’t got a wrist tag to fit her.
This fucking country.
Presumably they have a jail cell that is not too big for her?
Compare and contrast The Official Actions here with yet a further example of the stinking hypocrisy and double standards on display under ‘The Rules Based Order’, as highlighted here:
https://sonar21.com/biden-administration-admits-that-global-war-on-terrorism-is-total-b-s/
“After today’s events in Syria, US credibility as a major player in the global war on terrorism — Islamic terrorism to be precise — is destroyed. Despite spending ten years on the US list of bad terrorists and earning a $10 million bounty on his head, Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani welcomed a US delegation, led by Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf, to Damascus.
She was accompanied by former U.S. envoy to Syria Daniel Rubinstein who will stay in Syria as the top U.S. diplomat on the ground.
Leaf greeted Jawlani with the news that the US was lifting the $10 million bounty as long as Jawlani pinky-swore “to not allow terrorist organizations to operate within Syrian territory or pose threats to the US or neighboring countries.””
Laws and rules – as, for example, under the LP joke of a discipline and grievance process – are applied or not for the corrupt convenience of a parasitic and incompetent minority and their sycophantic stooges who clearly believe that laws and rules only apply to the inferior plebs and do not apply to themselves.
Do their bidding and you can get away with genocide, the mass shooting of children in the head, firing rockets on civilians, beheading people, torture, ecocide, social murder for profit by denying people life saving treatment and more. React in any way negatively to such crimes – even a verbal complaint – and you will be outlawed in a myriad of different ways. Arrested and jailed as a terrorist, – no matter what your health condition – smeared and vilified across the corporate media, harassed for “hate crime”, accused of the highest for of bigotry under a manufactured hierarchy of oppression doctrine, have your bank account taken away, face a death sentence, be tortured and murdered, lose your job, even have your elections annulled and your country regime changed.
And this is the “democracy” these parasites are adamant must be imposed on everybody everywhere on their say so.
Join the SHA “socialist health association” who have made this a top priority to pressure Streeting into stopping their use. We need as much backing in support to reverse these insane practices, which is not only harming patient care but conforming to the American style of a health system.