Starmer facilitating eroding strength of training for doctors

The Starmer government has opened a “terrifying” ‘consultation’ on its plan to remove the need for medical training for classification as qualified by the General Medical Council (GMC).

The GMC, until recently, exclusively regulated doctors – those with full medical qualifications. The Starmer-Streeting axis has already – with the collusion of the GMC – started to erode that distinction by allowing the GMC to regulate ‘medical associates’ – people with far less training than an actual doctor.

A number of people have already died after misdiagnosis or wrong treatment by ‘associates’ they believed were doctors. The government knows using these roles to fill medical positions is extremely dangerous – and have been told the same repeatedly by doctors and academics.

Starmer making things much worse

But now, the government is going further. It has opened a ‘consultation‘ on:

the draft General Medical Council Order 2026, which would reform how the General Medical Council (GMC) regulates medical practitioners, physician associates and anaesthesia associates across the UK.

So far, so bland. But it’s not. As Doctors Association co-chair Dr Matt Kneale explains in a thread on X, it means allowing the GMC to “remove the guardrails” separating actual doctors from other people presenting in white coats in medical settings:

This then means the GMC can extend ‘CCTs’, until now only available to fully-trained doctors, to ‘associates’ with a fraction of the training. This is self-evidently dangerous – and all of us need to act now:

Intervention needed

As one clinician said this morning:

EVERYONE (whether doctors or not) must contribute to this ‘consultation’

It states that the GMC will be able to decide whether a PERSON (not ‘a doctor’) can be put onto the Specialist Register. Not just PAs, I assume, but also ACPs, presumably having been assessed by other PAs or ACPs.

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Also, the GMC wants to continue to appeal against tribunal decisions not to sanction/strike off doctors for things like protesting against genocide.

This organisation needs a total boycott and is certainly not fit for purpose in any way.

The Doctors Association will be submitting its own direct response. But everyone who cares about the NHS, or even just about their own safety and health, needs to do the same.

Featured image via the Canary