It is. We have been concerned about what might happen, for example, in many indigenous communities where there may only be one or two providers, often just nurses—not “just” but nurses versus physicians, I should say. However, that's a bit of an extreme.
The example I will share is that I have just finished my term of two years as the board chair here at the Winchester District Memorial Hospital in eastern Ontario. As a rural person of 20 years or so now, I can tell you that everybody knows everybody. Yes, we can certainly make a phone call and have an external assessor from a different community come in, but all our physicians know each other and they know the nurses and so on. We are concerned that could hamper the process and hold it up.
Physicians and nurses are deeply ethically bound to a certain code of behaviour. Knowing or not knowing the other provider should not lead to coercion or conspiracy, if that's the fear.