Parents of woman killed by ‘associate’ misdiagnosis testify in court case this week against GMC

Medical regulator’s refusal to set national standards for safety and consent in use of non-doctors challenged in High Court by anaesthetists’ group

The family of a young actress who died after a ‘physician associate’ (PA) – a role without doctor training but increasingly used by NHS trusts and pushed hard by Health Secretary Wes Streeting to cut NHS costs and allow trusts to cut corners and avoid standards – failed to spot a life-threatening condition will appear in court this week, alongside a group of doctors who are taking the regulator to court for refusing to set standards for how PAs can be used in the NHS.

The government knows this plan puts patients in danger because its own analysis told it so:

Govt’s own analysis says its non-doctor ‘associate’ plan poses HIGH risk for patients

Emily Chesterton was killed in November 2022 after a PA misdiagnosed a lethal pulmonary embolism as a calf strain and sent her home from Accident and Emergency. PAs have just two years training instead of the minimum of seven years required for qualification as a hospital doctor.

Labour and Streeting are fully committed to the dangerous expanded use of PAs (and AAs, anaesthetist associates) as part of the government’s privatiser-written slash-and-burn ’10-year plan’ for the NHS, modelled on the so-called ‘integrated care’ system imported from the US, in which Trusts and other NHS providers are incentivised to ration patient care by giving them a share of the ‘savings’ generated by not treating patients, or by treating them more cheaply. Keir Starmer’s party even collaborated with the Tories to push through the expansion plan when Labour was supposedly in ‘opposition’. Several other people have been killed by PA misdiagnoses.

The Anaesthetists United (AU) group is taking the General Medical Council (GMC), which collaborated with the last Tory government to become the regulator for these non-regulated roles, to court on Wednesday and Thursday this week for refusing to set national standards for how trusts can use PAs to ensure patient safety and that every patient has the chance to give or withhold informed consent to be treated by a non-doctor.

But the GMC didn’t just refuse. It rebuked anaesthetists for suggesting that there even should be standards, telling them that this would be ‘insufficiently flexible’ and that it was ‘beyond [their] remit to ‘seek to place requirements on employers:

In its summary of the case, AU says that the situation created by the GMC and the government is a ‘ticking time-bomb’:

PAs and AAs are not doctors. They are taking over roles and responsibilities that have traditionally been undertaken by doctors, even though they have had less training.

The government has presented them as delivering “vital specific aspects of patient care” but nobody knows what those aspects are. In fact, many PAs are working by themselves, with little or no oversight, without patients even realising that they aren’t seeing a doctor. “Supervision” often amounts to nothing more than a doctor being reachable by phone, if the PA chooses to contact them. 

The General Medical Council (GMC), who is now the regulator, has refused to establish national standards for supervision of PAs, their scope of practice, or processes for gaining patient consent. This has created a ticking time bomb in patient safety; and as the number of PAs grows then so too does the size of the problem.

The summary also features a video showing members of Emily Chesterton’s family describing what happened to her and the dangers they perceive for other patients:

AU is urgently trying to raise funds for the continuation of the case. Those who want to donate can do so here.

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