NHS trust pushes misleading material

  • Post last modified:June 19, 2024
  • Reading time:14 mins read


A branch of a local NHS care board has been circulating highly misleading – and possibly illegal – leaflets and material on controversial physician associates.

To make matters worse, the branch has downplayed its supposed ‘mistake’ and doubled-down with justification for its deceptive campaign.

Physician associates posing as doctors in poster campaign

On 15 June, people on X started flagging an informational campaign by Bradford District Craven Health & Care Partnership. It is an Integrated Care Board (ICB) committee under West York ICB. Crucially, it is a “the key-decision making body” for the area.

Given this, people on social media were rightly alarmed when some posters picked up on some misleading patient information material. Specifically, X users first highlighted a poster the ICB had produced:

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the end of it. Following this, palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke dropped more duplicitous poster bombshells from the same branch:

In short, the posters were passing off so-called physician associates as ‘physicians’. As people on X pointed out, this has the effect of implying a fully trained medical doctor, when of course, physician associates are not. Some X users articulated the difference:

So, genuine physicians: a minimum of five years medical training at degree level. PAs: just two years on a medical course. If that wasn’t bad enough, Dr Clarke then highlighted the concerning 100% pass rate for physician associates.

Understandably, this all caused outrage on X.

Feedback on how not to break the law

Embroiled in a scandal of its own making, the care partnership reacted swiftly to mitigate the reputational damage over physician associates. However, like most bodies, it isn’t hugely in the business of admitting to its mistakes.

First, the NHS branch merely began by replying to some of the X users raising the issue. In the earliest, it offered to “work with colleagues… to make necessary changes”:

In various iterations of the same response, it essentially started by calling for feedback on the campaign:

When people pointed out how the posters were misleading, it said:

Of course, this was not the core issue, as one person on X deftly articulated:

Notably, under the Medical Act (1983), the term ‘physician’ is protected by law, so it shouldn’t legally be using it in this way:

The plot thickened

Then, perhaps feeling the heat, the branch claimed of its physician associates posters:

Eventually, it issued a statement. As Pulse reported, it said that:

We now recognise that despite receiving feedback from one of our clinical leads, we had not updated all our campaign resources.

‘Therefore, the title of physician associate has been incorrectly labelled as physician and although a corrected version of the leaflet was produced, it had not been changed on posters or animations.

‘In addition, there are two other titles with the word “specialist” being used which has been highlighted as incorrect, and a healthcare assistant mistakenly described as “nurse”. These are significant errors and should have been avoided.’

It added that a ‘rapid internal review’ is being carried out to understand how the mistake happened and to ensure it does not happen again.

Of course, as some suggested, the damage may have already been done:

Posters on physician associates were “deliberately misleading”

Meanwhile, others expressed how the illegal use of ‘physician’ for physician associates was just the tip of the iceberg. The posters also used similarly deceptive references to cancer and heart ‘specialists’, which some felt implied medical doctors.

Gallingly, the body labelled these as “mistakes” and thanked people on social media for their “compassion when feeding back”:

Many felt that far from a series of errors, it was a willful misrepresentation of information:

Moreover, as the British Medical Journal (BMJ) indicated, local clinicians had in fact raised their concerns over these posters as early as February 2023:

Of course, it’s now nearly a year and a half on from this, and the local branch still had these posters floating around.

Conservatives privatisation plans

However, others highlighted how it underlined a much broader issue. For one, physician associates are of course the machinations of the former Conservative Party government to privatise the NHS.

What’s more, some identified how NHS executives have been complicit in the roll-out:

Ultimately then, the deceitful information campaign demonstrated the Tories’ dangerous plans in practice. Local care board branches promoting this type of misleading material will put patients at risk.

If it hadn’t been for people highlighting this on social media, it would have continued pushing out this false information to the local populace. If the state of the NHS seemed like it couldn’t get any worse, this proved that untrue – it just did.

Feature image via RCSI – Youtube





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