Britain’s largest chain of family practice practices allows less qualified staff to see patients without supervision

The UK’s largest chain of family practice practices has been caught showing patients without the supervision of less qualified staff.

Operasis Health has 70 clinics across England and serves around 600,000 NHS patients.

An undercover BBC reporter working as a receptionist in a London office was told the company was hiring “cheaper” medical assistants.

Starting with an annual salary of £27,000, medical assistants are hailed as a way to supplement the general practice, allowing overburdened family doctors to focus on more complex cases.

But critics say they do a job that really needs to be done by doctors who make an average of £100,000 a year.

BBC Panorama found that medical personnel were not adequately supervised in an unnamed operation in the capital.

He wrote: “Officers told the undercover reporter that they had seen all kinds of patients, sometimes without any clinical control.

“They said the practice treated them equally as general practitioners.”

Panorama found that Operase, owned by US healthcare giant Centene Corporation, employs 0.6 full-time primary care physicians for every 2,000 enrolled patients, half of the national average.

The company also employs six times more healthcare professionals than the NHS average, according to healthcare data.

“They did the same job as us, with less experience, less qualifications, and less money,” said an anonymous GP working for Opera.

The researcher was also told that important patient reference documents had not been read by doctors or pharmacists for months.

A company executive assistant said they were tasked with reviewing 200 documents a day and deciding which ones were important enough to be seen by a family doctor or pharmacist.

Some said they should use Google to decide what to do with certain documents.

Professor Sir Sam Everington, a senior GP in London, accused Operasis of “quality of care more than profit, money”.

Operose told MailOnline that the BBC prefers sensational reports about the nationwide shortage of primary care doctors.

“The fact that the BBC has decided to deliberately mislead and snoop on our GP practices, including youth team members, is a deep disappointment to address a story they report almost daily: a national GP shortage.”

“Like all practices across the country, we are entering possibly the most difficult period in NHS history,” he said.

The spokesperson added: “Despite these challenges, we have a solid track record of performance, recruitment and investment in our workforce and services.

“This success is owed to our employees who do their best every day to care for patients.”

Operose added that the Maintenance Quality Commission (CQC) safety oversight body rated 97% of its practices as good or excellent.

Physician Associates, a role that emerged in the United States in the 1960s, was introduced by the NHS in 2003.

They are health professionals who have received a two-year postgraduate education on a science diploma.

By comparison, a family doctor goes through ten years of education and training before practicing.

Medical assistants may take a medical history, perform a physical examination, and analyze test results, but they must always work under supervision.

They are not authorized to prescribe medication or refer patients for procedures.

Recent analyzes have shown that: In some parts of the country, there is only one doctor for every 2,500 patients.

Meanwhile, the UK employs 1,500 fewer fully qualified GPs than five years ago. And according to surveys, a third of employees now want to retire within the next five years.

Family physicians point to problems with increased workload, higher demands from patients, and “insufficient time to do the job”.

This comes amid an ongoing dispute over the lack of personal appointments for Brits who want to see their family doctor.

Personal counseling practitioners failed to return to pre-pandemic levels.

In the UK in April only 63% of consultations took place in person; The worst of Covid had passed and GPs said they needed to get back to “normal”.

Before the pandemic, more than 80% of family doctor appointments were face-to-face.

The Panorama investigation will air tonight at 8 PM on BBC One.

Official figures show that only 63% of consultations held in April were held personally in the UK. At the current pace, it will take until September 2023 to reach more than 80 percent of the commitments seen before the pandemic.

The UK GP postcode lottery was announced today as official data showed some areas had half as many doctors per patient as others. Analysis by the Nuffield Trust shows that Portsmouth has 39.5 primary care physicians caring for every 100,000 people. People in Thurrock have 40.3 GP per 100,000 people in the area and 41.9 GP per 100,000 people in Hull

The GP Worklife survey found that by 2021, more than half of primary care physicians were working six sessions per week or less, with each session lasting four hours and 10 minutes. About one-fifth of the workforce saw patients in four or fewer sessions, 12.4% worked in five sessions and 27.9% worked in six sessions.