The conflicted world of medical and social care:

It seems the use of “PA” for Personal Assistant may become a source of confusion as medics are increasingly using PA now for Physician Associate, for example in social media posts.

Interestingly, office workplaces have already started to use “EA” and Executive Assistant instead of PA to avoid confusion in recruiting staff.

I guess the pressure will be to rename PAs as Care Assistants; probably accompanied by pressure to align CAs with Health Care Assistants, HCAs in hospitals. Or maybe SCAs, Social Care Assistants, as a parallel career to HCAs.

Disabled people with Personal Health Budgets are already seeing their PAs being tasked as if they were community-based HCAs, with all the medicalisation that implies.