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The use of pharmacists and other advanced practitioners (APs) to cover doctor rotas in GP surgeries and hospitals means patient safety is “repeatedly put at risk,” The British Medical Association (BMA) has claimed.

Last week, the BMA shared reports it had received from members of alleged patient safety incidents said to have occurred after APs such as nurses, pharmacists, paramedics and midwives were brought in to cover rota gaps.

The BMA report included an account of a practice pharmacist referring a patient with type 1 diabetes to “a fast track service for suspected cancer” when the patient was suffering from dabetic ketoacidosis, without raising the matter with the GP.

One medical student in the North West of England said they had seen a practice pharmacist “taking on the role of a GP,” adding: “She did not identify herself a not being a GP to patients, used an AI programme to prompt her with appropriate questions to ask in very basic presenting complaint history and did not appropriately explain important details regarding condition management to patients.”

A salaried GP in the West Midlands said a pharmacist in their practice “was being rostered as a GP” which led to “multiple incidents of unsafe practices and working outside his scope of practice”.

BMA council chair Dr Tom Dolphin said: “These are shocking accounts of patients being let down by the system.

“Advanced practitioners are not to blame for this systemic failure. They are NHS colleagues who are hardworking, talented individuals trying to make the best of a situation one doctor described as a ‘farce’: management pressuring non-doctors to plug gaps in doctor rotas and do things only doctors should be doing. This is not fair on them.”

The BMA called for a prohibition of non-doctors being used on doctors’ rotas, an “urgent review” into the scope of practice of APs and an end to what it called the “taskification” of medicine, which it said involves “more and more tasks” being ‘shifted’ to other professions.

Responding to the report on Reddit, some pharmacists reported coming under pressure from their employers to work outside their scope of practice.

One surgery-based pharmacist said: “I feel pressure from GPs to act beyond my scope, which is very unpleasant.”

A community pharmacist said: “I generally agree that more and more things are being foisted on the pharmacy without proper consultation and training. I am starting to feel uncomfortable with some of the proposed things that pharmacy is expected to take on, especially on top of what we do already.

“Whilst GPs are right to highlight their concerns, and bad decisions that they come across, all of us can tell you about GPs bad clinical decisions too. I have even corrected a GP during my child’s consultation.

“The big difficulty I have is that the PGDs for Pharmacy First keep getting updated and there is doctor input in to them, and they keep widening the scope of inclusion.”

Another commenter said their pharmacy gets “sent absolutely anything and everything and that's by the GP surgeries… as soon as someone mentions chest infection or ear infection they are sent to a pharmacy despite the fact that most pharmacists are not Independent prescribers and don't deal with those things”.

Related: BMA warns pharmacist prescribing risks ‘compromising patient safety’ and calls for ‘restraint’