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It can be tempting to offer advice to people you know and who are not close friends or family, but there are things to consider, Abi Rimmer hears
Alison Whiting, policy officer for standards at the General Medical Council, says, “In our core guidance, Good Medical Practice , we say that wherever possible doctors should not provide medical care to anyone with whom they have a close personal relationship.
“There are several reasons for this. It can be difficult for patients in these circumstances to be open and honest about their medical history and treatment, and doctors may come under pressure to provide a particular treatment or find it difficult to be objective about a patient’s need for it.
“We don’t forbid doctors from treating their family or friends if it may be reasonable for them to do so, where no other doctor is available for example, in an emergency or if they work in a remote rural area. But we do urge caution and careful consideration of the risks, as well as
Recruitment of medical associate professionals should be paused to allow time for problems around regulation, scope of practice, and supervision to be resolved, writes David Nicholl
As Partha Kar said in his recent column, the whole situation around medical associate professionals, including physician associates and anaesthetic associates, is “an unqualified mess.”1 The latest development in the debate is that the BMA has called for a pause in the recruitment of medical associate professionals to allow time to resolve the matters of scope of practice, the level of supervision, and statutory regulation.2 Expansion of medical associate professionals was a key part of the NHS Workforce Plan, which proposed introducing 10 000 physician associates in total by 2036.3 But doctors have voiced their concerns about the risks of medical associate professionals performing tasks that they haven’t been trained for, the extra workload it will put on doctors supervising them, and the lack of c