“Newborn left disabled after symptoms missed by a physician associate”

[ourchildrenareourfuture]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13679799/amp/Newborn-left-disabled-signs-illness-missed-physician-associate.html

Alerted to this by another poster on mums net. This is so frightening. Ask for a doctor. From the daily mail:

A newborn at a scandal-hit hospital was left with lifelong injuries because a medic with only two years' training failed to spot 'concerning' signs that the child was unwell, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The baby, born at West Suffolk Hospital, was cared for by a physician associate (PA), an NHS worker with no medical degree who is only meant to assist doctors and nurses.

Lots of threads on here about PAs. They are not medics as you describe. They complete a basic two year course with a multiple choice test that has a 100% pass rate.
They are paid more than many doctors. A doctor starts on about £32k after 5 years of training and PAs start on upward of £40k.
There are doctors who can't get jobs because roles are filled with pretend doctors.
The money wasted by the NHS on these roles is appalling and could be so much better spent employing and training proper doctors.

I’m not generally supportive of PAs but to be fair in this instance a neonatal nurse was also present and doing the blood test and also didn’t pick up the symptoms? So either they were both incompetent or it wasn’t really that obvious

Hi Merro, thanks for your response. I was quoting the dailyMail who referred to them as medics. It’s really misleading. I completely agree with you. It’s frightening.

Was it because the PA failed to spot it though? Are they trained to spot whatever it was? or is it because they weren't being supervised as they should have been?

It doesn’t seem to be an issue when doctors and midwives neglect newborns though does it.

You were quoting the Daily Mail? And it was really misleading?

Oh well, there we are then.

There are huge systemic issues around PA training and education in the UK.

When it comes to training, quality of programmes has been sacrificed for speed - programmes have been hastily set up.
There is still no accreditation body guaranteeing the quality of the education/ training.
Very little pharmacology education is required.

The deployment of PAs to deprived areas in lieu of actual doctors will result in poor outcomes - the doctors are not wrong in this argument. The limitations of PAs are very evident in deprived areas of the US

www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/30/wider-use-of-physician-associates-will-increase-inequality-say-uk-doctors

There have been several investigations into death and serious injury to newborns in many trusts.

"Lessons have been learned"