This has stuck in my mind today.
In social services, there is a huge overlap between what qualified and unqualified field workers do. Massive. However, there are some things that unqualified staff will (quite rightly) never be involved in, child protection and a lot of aspects of mental health. An unqualified person will never be going out as an AMHP ( Approved Mental Health Professional) with doctors when someone is sectioned, however good they are at their jobs, however experienced, however well educated (plenty of community care workers who are not qualified social workers have degrees now) This is the way it should be, it protects the workers and most importantly, the people they work with.
Why then should people be happy to have people who have not gone the hard yards to be a doctor in charge of their health? Trainee doctors don't do the 60 hour weeks in training as some sort of Iron Man challenge but because there is a lot to learn and part of that training is in, crucially, diagnostics. That makes them different from other HCPs including senior nurses.
A story. My late DH had a painless, non healing mouth ulcer. He was sent away twice by an ANP with mouthwash over a period of 2 weeks before he insisted on seeing his doctor, who immediately referred him for an urgent biopsy. This GP (my own) told me after my DH died that he recognised what was wrong immediately. I feel no resentment, there was not a bad enough delay to change the outcome and have a great deal of respect for ANPs, I've seen them myself very happily. I'm saying this to highlight, not that it should need it, that expecting people with inadequate training to be quasi doctors is not right. Not right for them and not right for all of us.