I'm still struggling to get my head around this surgery thing. As it stands, surgical trainees are chomping at the bit to get theatre time, so much that we've employed ANPs to staff the wards doing previously junior doc jobs so they get theatre time. On top of this, there's not enough hours in the day (as far as EWTD is concerned) for them to get as many hours as it stands on top of ward time. While waiting lists are a concern, wouldn't it make more sense to use these PAs on the wards so that the trainees hours could be rotated more flexibly to meet both the needs of the service and their training needs together?
Also, the AAA graft going through someone's duodenum while they had a completely unrelated knee op has nothing to do with the minor vs major surgery thing. A cholecystectomy is NOT what I or many others would define as a minor op, be it laparoscopic or open.
The other side of this is that there may be space for training some PAs in scrub to work as first assistant, however, if you're a consultant looking for people to train up to do this as a non trainee role, who do you go for? The PA with two years experience as a trainee PA revolving throughout all sorts of different specialities or the scrub nurse/ODP who has 5-10 years + of solely periop experience in the theatre environment training as a surgical care practitioner, a role that's well established in a lot of cardiothoracic teams (and many others) already.