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In India, the few private hospitals that do hire NPs use them for one purpose only, they're usually trained to do procedures in the ICU, I'd say usually under doctor supervision, but I was a Medical Officer fresh out from an internship and my presence was superfluous. At least they never dared to take training opportunities away from actual CCM residents or registrars, if they wanted to do something, they got a crack at it.
If you think the US is bad about mid-level scope creep, wait till you hear about the UK.
There, NPs and PAs are both just about as useless as there, but have been bulldozed in by the government because they're far cheaper in the long run than an actual doctor, you know, the kind that expects career progression and also has the temerity to run away for greener pastures when fucked with.
They can't prescribe, nor order most investigations, and anything they do has to be be double checked by a harried doctor. Thankfully, the movement to curtail their expansion has been taking off hard, with doctors both working to rule (Oh, as a PA you report only to my consultant? Sorry, I'm snowed in, I can't sign off on a patient I haven't personally reviewed, please go badger the boss, they'll be very happy about it).
In fact, new guidance on the level of autonomy they possess, especially in GP, makes it so that they're effectively redundant in any practice, so the latter are now begrudgingly forced to accept that actual GPs are non-negotiable.
Add in scandals over them grossly overstepping their remit, and fucking up cases that would be obvious to any semi-competent doctor, such as dismissing obvious MIs with good old PPIs and a paracetamol..
It's all exacerbated by rotational training, with consultants unwilling to invest effort in mentoring and training their juniors who are going to fuck off to a new hospital, whereas they could at least teach the rote mechanical skills to a NP/PA who'll be working under them for their whole career.
What's doubly farcical is that they're paid more than FY1 and FY2 doctors, who are both more competent, and in the latter case, actually capable of ordering followup investigations for whatever they suspect is the case.
This bit is one of the worst bits. So they get paid more than residents. Work literally half as much. Hoover up all the easy cases. Fuck them up anyway. And work strict hours with breaks so they don't get a lot of work done anyway and just leave midway through shit.
On some inpatient units adding an expensive mid level who costs as much as two residents actually makes things worse. It's insane.
I also just do not understand why it's so hard to convince people that doctors with tens of thousands of hours more training are in fact more competent than nurses with a small amount of shadowing experience and with little to no formal education in actual medicine.
Clown world.
They bear almost no medicolegal responsibility, as long as they do their job, which is being largely useless. Seriously, if you, as a random doctor on the ward, ever get called over while harried to death in the middle of your shift and they ask you to sign off on their suggestions, then it's all on your head if something goes south. And if you refuse, well, you better be ready to face the ire of your seniors, who'll tell you to be a team player.
Fucking, hell they make more money than I do for my first year as a CT1 trainee. Matching my salary next year to boot. Maybe a quarter the time in education, exams where it's ridiculously difficult to flunk, and then they rake in the big bucks and have stable postings without rotational training and can coast until they often end up poached into managerial positions that were once expected to be done by doctors.
It might be a clown world where you're at, but here, the inmates are running the asylum. The UK has a massive shortfall of actual training positions, so it's both a miracle I made it on my first go, and people who don't are SOL till next year around while yet more medical students are pumped out. (I note the conflict of interest as an IMG, but I don't care, they have it easy compared to the shit I go through, and if they want to protest the erosion of pay and scope creep, I'm with them in the picket line)
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