Draft Anaesthesia Associates and Physician Associates Order 2024

Thérèse Coffey Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2024 General Committees

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Caroline. This may surprise Members, but I am not a member of the Committee. However, I care about this issue. I believe that the expansion in the number of associates is fully in the interests of patients. By virtue of this Order in Council—which has also been put forward by Scottish Government Ministers—there will be a necessary and rightful route by which physician associates and anaesthesia associates can be regulated by the General Medical Council, with all its professional elements. There will be a curriculum, continuous professional development, and a variety of other things that we expect of other professionals in the NHS and the wider health services.

This may all sound a bit odd. Why do we not just get more people to become doctors? The Government, however, have already addressed that, through the expansion in medical school places that is to happen. I will tell the Committee a personal story, through which I saw the issues at first hand. I will not pretend otherwise: when I was, for a brief time, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, this event reinforced the reasons why I was keen to see this move make the progress that it is making.

About 18 months ago, Parliament was busy with a potential change in leadership, although Prime Minister Boris Johnson was still in post. I suffered an infection and went to a hospital in London, where I waited more than nine hours to see a doctor. I went home without any treatment, and then re-presented myself at a different London hospital, where I got the treatment that I needed within a much shorter time. This meant that I attended my last Cabinet meeting by phone from an NHS hospital bed.

The second hospital was quicker to deal with my situation, because it had a wider range of medical professionals, including a physician associate, who was able to do a lot of the work on the appropriate treatment, although of course that still needed sign-off by the doctor. Instead of patients waiting for hours for that one doctor, the hospital was using a full range of NHS professionals to the extent of their abilities. That is a sensible, practical way to ensure that patient care and safety is absolutely paramount.

Not all hospital trusts have associates, nor are they necessarily planning to have them, but I would strongly recommend that they do. When I think about the number of operations that could be happening, I really welcome the expansion of anaesthesia associates. The anaesthetist will be a key part of that, but imagine one anaesthetist helping with three operations at one time, along with appropriately trained and regulated anaesthesia associates. That is an approach that modernises the NHS’s capacity and capability to treat as many patients as possible.

In the past, there has been resistance to Pharmacy Direct, which is about to be launched, expanding the number of things that pharmacists can do. There has also been resistance to expanding what nurses can do without a doctor’s sign-off. There will be plenty of situations where people in community hospitals say, “Ah, yes, you’ve come in. We will try to treat that in the minor injuries unit, but we don’t have a prescribing nurse here, so you’ve got to either wait, or go to the doctor to get a prescription.” The modern NHS has to think about those situations, and be careful in how it deploys staff. This Order in Council is a key element of that. It brings associates into the same professional regulatory body and inspection regime as doctors—of course, people will know that there are other regulators for different professions.

I felt strongly about coming along to the Committee to support this order and see it progress. For me, patient safety will always be paramount, but I see this as a professional step forward, and I look forward to the change happening right across the United Kingdom.