Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will bring forward legislative proposals to ensure that physician associates are afforded the protection of formal statutory regulation.

The Department’s consultation ‘Regulating healthcare professionals, protecting the public’ closed on 16 June. The consultation sought views on proposals to modernise each of the healthcare professional regulators’ legal frameworks and on the proposed approach to introducing statutory regulation for physician associates (PAs) and anaesthesia associates (AAs).

The reforms will update the General Medical Council’s (GMC) current legislation, enabling it to bring PAs and AAs into regulation under a new, modernised framework. We plan to publish the consultation response in the autumn. A further consultation on the draft legislation that will bring PAs and AAs into regulation will follow. 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.