High Court judge gives GMC/govt green light to keep presenting non-doctors as doctors

Confusing ‘associates’ without doctor trainingwith real doctors is ok, apparently, as judge backs government’s rationing of expert medical care

The British Medical Association (BMA) has lost its case in the High Court against the General Medical Council (GMC) to try to prevent the GMC, which is collaborating with Keir Starmer’s government in its expansion of the use of ‘physician associates’ (PAs) in the NHS who have only two years training instead of the years of medical training required to become a real doctor. The BMA was arguing against the GMC’s persistent ‘blurring of the lines’ between PAs and fully-trained doctors.

The Starmer government is continuing and accelerating the Tories’ plans for a massive expansion of the use of PAs as part of the cost-cutting, treatment-rationing and profit-maximisation of its so-called ‘integrated care systems’ plan, which rewards healthcare providers for withholding treatment, by giving them a share of the ‘savings’ achieved by providing less care.

In her ruling last week, High Court Mrs Justice Lambert sided with the GMC and dismissed all the BMA’s three claims, which covered the GMC’s use of the term ‘medical professionals’ to describe both PAs and trained doctors in its standards document titled ‘Good Medical Practice’, which clearly blurs the boundaries between PAs and real doctors.

A number of patients have already died as a result of misdiagnoses by PAs that they believed were doctors – and the government’s own experts have warned it that the use of PAs posed ‘high risk’ to patients. Doctors have been slapped down for even demanding that PAs operate under national standards to ensure patient safety.

Despite this, the judge disagreed with the BMA’s contention that:

patient safety requires that the distinction between medically qualified doctors and non-medically qualified associates is made clear by the GMC. 

The BMA’s lawyers had pointed to coroners’ findings about the safety PAs, including a report on the death of Pamela Marking in which the coroner raised the issue of patient confusion about who PAs are and what qualifications they have. 

The BMA said it is now ‘considering [its] next steps’.

So-called ‘integrated care’ (ICS) is an import of the US ‘Accountable Care’ (ACOs) – which is used to cut costs and pays medical companies more the less they treat – and was called by the same name until the scandals around the US version began to percolate into the UK discourse.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting and his boss Keir Starmer, like most of Labour’s front bench, have taken large sums of money from private healthcare interests. As so-called ‘opposition leader’, Starmer collaborated with the Tories to rush through the expansion of associates through a backdoor route and Streeting has made the use of PAs and the extension of ICS a core part of his ‘slash and burn’ ten-year NHS plan, appointing private health moguls who have pushed ICS to both oversee the implementation of the plan and to run the Department of Health and Social Care.

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