Only the biggest existential crisis in Medicine we have ever seen.
Why has NHSEngland just called for a 10 fold increase in the number of Anaesthesia Associates? Just because they don’t like doctors?
We think the GMC should not be regulating Associates because it blurs the distinction between doctors and non-doctors. And making that distinction is what the GMC was always meant to be doing.
We are calling for Anaesthesia Associates to be properly supervised – and we expect the CQC to enforce that. And we’re not prepared to see individual hospitals opt-out of proper supervision just to save money.
We are calling for the College to take the actions voted for at the EGM to oppose this enormous expansion.
Patients need to be made aware when they are being anaesthetised by a non-doctor.
But that isn’t all we want to see changed.
We want to see changes to Rotational Training. It has huge costs for doctors. It tears families apart. And a lot of the time it isn’t even necessary. Just something for the convenience of HEE and the inconvenience of us.
We want to see some accountability for the mistakes that happened in recruitment. Two columns in a spreadsheet were swapped around and the wrong people were given jobs. Some missing scores were just made up. But far worse, one of the doctors in HEE tried to cover that up.
And we want to see some changes made to interviews. We want to be interviewed by the people that we will actually work with , so that they can answer questions about what their programme is really like. And so we can have a sensible conversation with them about what we’d like to do, and tell them about ourselves as individuals.
Like they do in every other job interview.
We’re fed up with being assessed on our ability to recite buzzwords, to somebody we’ll never see again, so they can just tick a box.