Helen Salisbury: Training our replacements

Are there limits on what people should be allowed to do in the medical or surgical field when they’re not a doctor and not training to be one? We teach someone our skills so that they may one day exercise them independently, and almost from the moment we qualify as doctors we start training our replacements.The time available for this training is finite, so we should think carefully about how we spend those precious hours and who exactly will replace us. If a medical associate practitioner (anaesthesia associate, surgical care practitioner, or physician associate) should never be in a position where they’re expected to perform a particular task unsupervised, does it make practical or economic sense to train them to do it?A recent paper in the journal of the Royal College of Surgeons, about a case series of 170 laparoscopic cholecystectomies performed by surgical care practitioners (SCPs), raised many eyebrows…
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