BMA granted permission to submit evidence to PA legal challenge

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By Daniel Pye

The British Medical Association has been granted permission to submit evidence to a legal challenge against the General Medical Council’s regulation of physician and anaesthesia associates.

The case is being brought by the campaign group Anaesthetists United and Marion and Brendan Chesterton, whose daughter Emily died in 2022 after being misdiagnosed by a PA whom she had believed was a GP.

The BMA is financially supporting the case, which is scheduled at the High Court for a 2-day hearing next month.

AU and the Chestertons want the court to decide whether the GMC has “misunderstood its powers” by not setting national standards governing what PAs and AAs can and cannot do.

The GMC has repeatedly stated that, like other healthcare regulators, it does not set the scope of practice that determines what individual professionals can do.

In its magazine The Doctor, the BMA said that despite it being listed as an interested party in the claimants’ case “lawyers for the GMC had sought to argue that allowing the association to submit evidence would cause ‘difficulties’ to the proceedings”.