Linda LeBlanc: Addressing the risks of credentials creep

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The importance of professional credentials respect is indisputable, whether it be ensuring engineers are in charge of bridge building or physicians are in charge of symptom triage.

The British Medical Association recently published a document to address the lack of clear guidelines for non physicians assuming wider scopes of practice. This work was initiated subsequent to three widely publicized patient deaths in the United Kingdom resulting from non physicians practicing beyond their scope who failed to recognize life-threatening conditions. The guideline emphasizes the importance of unambiguous role definition in multidisciplinary care, ensuring health workers’ credentials are clearly communicated to patients.

Since 2018 it is illegal in New Brunswick for a non physician to misrepresent their professional credentials by falsely claiming to be ‘medically trained.’ This law resulted from an initiative that three physician colleagues and I undertook in 2017. Doctors cross country were sharing multiple examples of patients presenting to medical attention for harm inflicted by ‘practitioners’ after being misled into stopping prescribed medications or forgoing life-saving cancer treatment. As a result we were faced with the moral injury of treating the adverse outcomes of this dupery with no further recourse given lack of a law prohibiting this practice.

A petition signed by hundreds of physicians across Canada was sent to all provincial and territorial college registrars and ministers of health. New Brunswick’s then College of Physicians and Surgeons’ registrar acknowledged the importance of this issue which resulted in the court injunction. We are the only Canadian province with such a law protecting patients against practitioner misrepresentation.

Physicians’ licenses are rightly limited to field of training and associated proof of competence. This rule should apply to all other allied health professionals. It is incumbent that patient safety remain at the core of ongoing multidisciplinary care model integration.

Dr. Linda LeBlanc is a radiation oncologist practicing in Moncton