Path to a Profession: How a Physician Assistant Becomes a Physician Assistant.

This pilot study, through the application of phenomenological methodology, considered the physician assistant (PA) profession as a "lived experience" in an attempt to understand how these medical practitioners end up on the PA path and what keeps them there. Additionally, the researchers focused on understanding why specific individuals gravitate towards the PA education option. Major themes that developed during the interviews with eight PAs included personal unfamiliarity with the PA profession during the first two decades of life, the decision to pursue PA training while in undergraduate studies, assuming roles often considered MD/DO specific and the subsequent patient confusion with the difference between a PA and an MD/DO, and significant work satisfaction resulting in the lack of desire to change profession. These themes, especially personal unfamiliarity with the PA profession and patient confusion with the difference between a PA and an MD/DO, promotes an environment that perpetuates a lack of understanding about PAs, particularly in younger (e.g., pre-collegiate) individuals. Considering the consequences of this knowledge gap along with the equivocal validity of a pilot study and the potentially subjective nature of phenomenology, the researchers recommend further investigations, both quantitative and qualitative, to either confirm or repudiate these findings.

A Method to Study the Effect of a Physician Assistant Student on Preceptor Productivity.

PURPOSE: Guided clinical experience is a critical component of a physician assistant (PA) student's education. However, clinical precepting is strongly perceived to have deleterious effects on productivity. In this study, we sought to test a method for evaluating the effect that PA students have on clinical productivity. METHODS: We recruited 14 family medicine preceptors and second-year PA students from 2 programs, the University of Washington (UW) and the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio (UT). We collected productivity data during 3 weeks of preceptor clinical practice-one week without a PA student present and 2 weeks with a PA student present (one week early in the student's family medicine clinical rotation and a second week late in the rotation). We collected preceptor demographic data, patient characteristics, and the primary outcome-relative value units (RVUs) per preceptor per half-day during the 3 data collection weeks. At the end of the study, we asked preceptors about the ease of data collection and any negative effects of the study itself on their clinical productivity. RESULTS: No significant differences were found in preceptor demographics or in patient characteristics, numbers of patients, or RVUs per patient seen in any of the weeks or between UW and UT. In this pilot study, no significant differences were seen in RVUs per preceptor per half-day between the 3 weeks of observation or between UW and UT. CONCLUSION: In this pilot study, the protocol was straightforward, unintrusive, and preliminarily showed no significant effects of a PA student on preceptor productivity.