Physician Associate

Physician associates are:

• Medically trained generalist healthcare professionals who work together with and are supervised by GPs.
• They provide medical care as part of the multi-disciplinary team.
• Usually have a bioscience related first degree and receive further training as well.
• They train for 2 years on postgraduate programmes focusing on general adult medicine in hospitals and general practice.
• The government has announced plans to introduce statutory regulation of Physician Associates by working with the Royal College of Physicians and Faculty of Physician Associates
• Regulation provides the opportunity to embed PAs into the NHS workforce across primary and secondary care. As one of the only growing healthcare professions, PAs have the opportunity to help shape healthcare moving forward to ensure the NHS meets the needs of patients and delivers high-quality patient care.

They can:

• Take medical histories from patients
• Carry out physical examinations
• See patients with undifferentiated diagnoses
• See patients with long term conditions (e.g. asthma, diabetes, COPD)
• Formulate differential diagnoses and management plans
• Perform diagnostic and therapeutic procedures
• Develop and deliver appropriate treatment and management plans
• Request and interpret diagnostic studies
• Provide health promotion and disease prevention advise to patients