Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, when the Government plans to bring forward legislative proposals on the regulation of physician associates.

The Government is committed to bringing physician associates (PAs) and anaesthesia associates (AAs) into statutory regulation.

We are currently consulting on proposals to modernise each of the healthcare professional regulators’ legal frameworks and on the proposed approach to introducing statutory regulation for PAs and AAs. A separate consultation on the draft legislation that will bring this framework into force will be carried out later this year.

The reforms will update the General Medical Council’s (GMC) current legislation and will enable it to bring PAs and AAs into regulation under its new, modernised framework. We are working with the GMC to ensure that regulation of PAs and AAs begins as early as possible in the second half of 2022.