And another one… this is beginning to look awfully coordinated…
Nothing to see here, just the National Medical Director of
@NHSEngland using an inaccurate, one-sided & context-free Times piece to double down on the insinuation that the only issue with PAs in the NHS is ‘online toxicity’ from a small number of rogue doctors.
You must know, Prof Powis, how disingenuous & inflammatory the framing in your tweet is. Of course bullying in all its forms is wrong. But thousands of doctors, myself included, have politely & professionally expressed grave concerns about the way PAs are being deployed. Multiple large scale surveys of doctors back us up. We have spoken out without bullying, toxicity or inappropriateness. We have been ignored by
@NHSEngland &
@gmcuk over & over again.
You may believe you can smear, belittle & silence every one of us by these carefully coordinated NHS establishment/media attacks on doctors, but what you are doing is more fully exposing a clear agenda.
To repeat (again), our motivation is patient safety. You cannot safely substitute doctors with non-doctors lacking a national scope of practice in on-call doctors rotas, as GPs, in operating theatres, anywhere. You cannot permit patients to be misled into thinking they’ve seen a doctor when they haven’t. You cannot & will not gaslight our profession by dressing up a wilful refusal to listen to our concerns as a form of “kindness”.
And if the Leng Report is a whitewash? We will persist and persist and persist.
I’m astounded you choose, even now, not to listen to doctors speaking out in their thousands on this issue. It’s arrogant & disrespectful - the NHS at its myopic worst.
The cases highlighted in this article are unacceptable. There is no place for these personal attacks in the NHS.
In the medical community we have to be clear that all NHS staff should feel safe to come to work and be treated with respect and dignity.