Professor Gillian Leng, President of the Royal Society of Medicine was asked to carry out an independent review into the role of physician and anaesthetic associates. She sits down with Kamran Abbasi, editor in chief of The BMJ, to discuss her findings. In the UK, the rollout of physician associates, NHS staff who took on some of the tasks of doctors, has been both haphazard and controversial. Originally copied from similar roles in the U.S., British PAs were introduced in the early 2000s. The level of clinical responsibility they were asked to take on began to vary around the country, driven mostly by the workforce needs of individual Trusts. The lack of clarity about their roles lead to disquiet with doctors, worry for patients, and an increasingly toxic debate on social media. 00:00 Coming up 01:05 What is the Leng Review? 03:33 Lessons from the evidence 06:42 Asking questions of the professionals 10:20 Recommendation one: Renaming 13:40 Recommendation two: Easier identification 16:11 Recommendation three: How to work? 19:53 Recommendation four: Diagnosis 23:06 Medical tightrope 24:54 Recommendation five: Oversight & Regulation 31:40 Prescribing and ordering ionizing radiation? 34:56 The history of PAs and AAs in the NHS 38:52 Are PAs cost effective? 40:22 A failure of workforce planning and vision ? 42:29 What are PAs best at? 44:37 Halting PA recruitment? 45:30 Two tier care with PAs? 46:50 PAs and mental health services 48:48 The NHS 10 year plan

Shorts

The BMJ was first published in 1840 as The Provincial Medical Journal. Since then it has published many of the papers which have transformed healthcare. To celebrate the whole archive becoming available online, we commissioned a series of videos to celebrate some of the stories which can be found within it.