Non‐Traditional Roles and Unmet Care Need During Primary Care Appointments

ABSTRACT

Primary healthcare systems worldwide face a shortage of General Practitioners and Nurses. One response by the English Health System to combat this shortage is to expand the role of non‐traditional roles in primary care, often shifting away tasks from Nurses. Non‐traditional practitioners, though less taxing on budgets, tend to have less formal training than Doctors and Nurses, which may affect quality of care. Using data from 614,115 respondents to a survey of primary care patients in England between 2018 and 2022, we assess the extent to which non‐traditional practitioners meet patients' needs in primary care appointments. Patients who see a non‐traditional provider have a 12.6 percentage points lower probability that their care needs were met, relative to those seeing a Nurse. Findings are consistent across linear, probit and instrumented recursive bivariate probit models, and concentrated amongst patients aged 35–54.