The NHS plans to recruit more than 2,000 science graduates to become doctors' assistants, working in hospitals and GP surgeries with a wide range of responsibilities for diagnosis, treatment and prescribing, the Department of Health said yesterday.

The new grade - provisionally called medical care practitioner (MCP) - was borrowed from the US, where "physicians' assistants" perform a full range of medical duties, including resuscitation, paediatrics and anaesthesia. The decision to deploy doctors' assistants in England was described by the Department of Health yesterday as bringing roles from the television drama ER to the heart of the NHS.

David Colin-Thome, the government's primary care tsar, said the medical care practitioners will work under the general supervision of consultants or GPs, but will be able to practise without fully qualified doctors in attendance. The MCPs were likely to be science graduates who would undergo two years of intensive training. They would not be able to progress to become doctors without starting from scratch on a full-scale medical degree. They are likely to be paid about half the salary of a fully qualified doctor.

Mary Armitage, clinical vice-president of the Royal College of Physicians, said the scheme would remove confusion among patients about a "plethora of unregulated healthcare support workers" who were already employed by NHS trusts, under different titles and with no clear rules about training and responsibilities. But Hamish Meldrum, chairman of the BMA's GPs committee, said: "I would need a lot of convincing that MCPs would be of added benefit and would not confuse patients as to who exactly was treating them."