ICU Physician Associates (PAs)

ICU Physician Associates (PA’s) are healthcare professionals with a generalist medical education, who work alongside doctors, physicians, GPs and surgeons providing medical care as an integral part of the multidisciplinary team. Physician associates are dependent practitioners working with a dedicated consultant supervisor, but are able to work autonomously with appropriate support.

In the ICUs at Guy's and St Thomas's the PAs work closely with the ICU doctors and are supervised by the ICU consultant. They attend the daily ward rounds and review patients care, examining, diagnosing, treating, and performing procedures supporting the post graduate (junior) doctors.

PAs cannot prescribe medications or order x-rays or provide treatment or care unsupervised and so rely on the ICU medical team to complete these tasks.