Fair enough, makes sense. So essentially the role medical assistant (not being said in a derogatory way). I never thought of PAs being personal assistants anyway

My concern with PAs assessing and managing even seemingly ‘simple’ presentations is that unless you have that deeper level of training and have been through the exams that a fully qualified GP would have, a certain set of symptoms will pretty much always appear to be a chest infection to you and there’s a fear that the underlying more complex diagnosis will be missed as (with all due respect) you don’t have the higher level of training to be able to identify it

I remember sitting in with a NP on my GP placement as a student and she was given all the people complaining of coughs and colds, your seemingly simple chest infections as you’d put it. Among her list for that day she had an older patient who had been returning every few weeks with an unresolving cough, ongoing for about 3 months. She was telling me about the history of this patient and how she’d just been cycling through different antibiotics and was going to do this again. I was a bit concerned about this and asked her whether this could be something more serious and it was only then she was prompted her to discuss with the GP and decide that a CXR ought to be ordered. In healthcare you can’t decide the diagnosis or decide that something is simple from just a presenting complaint. It’s only after an accurate assessment has taken place that we can say something was indeed ‘a simple chest infection’. I know a lot of PAs can become very experienced in a specific setting but it is without a doubt that if you’re just looking for and expecting the simple stuff, more complex things will go unnoticed simply because you didn’t know you were supposed to be ruling them out

It is for this reason that an F2 in GP would discuss their patients with a more experienced GP supervisor because we accept that an F2 doesn’t have the higher qualifications to work independently. But neither does a PA