Time to Pivot: A Guide to Holistic Admissions.

ABSTRACT: As an ever-increasing number of physician assistant (PA) programs moves toward holistic admissions, a better understanding of how to achieve their stated admission goals becomes more important. With the June 2023 US Supreme Court decision effectively ending affirmative action in higher education, navigating holistic admissions is now an even greater challenge. In this article, the PA Education Association's Presidents Commission offers a guide for programs to use in implementing holistic admissions at their institutions and key considerations. Is the process mission-driven? Does it follow principles of quality improvement and incorporate ongoing assessment of that process? Using data can be a constructive and insightful way to inform the process. The authors hope that tools, resources, and recommendations offered in this article will serve as valuable resources for any program attempting to institute or improve its holistic admissions process.

Reflections on a Physician Assistant Entrance Exam: Does the Profession Need One?

ABSTRACT: Standardized entrance exams are used in many health professions as one way to objectively measure knowledge and facilitate comparisons across student groups. The physician assistant (PA) profession has historically not employed a profession-specific entrance exam, and the idea was never seriously explored until the Physician Assistant College Admissions Test was developed recently by a commercial assessment publisher, with field testing in some volunteer programs in 2018 and the exam's first administration in May of 2020. The 2020 Physician Assistant Education Association Presidents Commission chose to investigate the issues raised by a consensus-derived, PA-specific entrance exam to stimulate more informed discussion on the efficacy of such an exam. While it may have the potential to enhance efficiency in PA admissions and reduce variability in admissions requirements, a PA entrance exam would also likely introduce new challenges, including increased costs, impact on the diversity of the applicant pool, and incongruence with an increasingly holistic admissions process. The biggest barrier would likely be the lack of current consensus on the knowledge, skills, and attributes that matriculants need to be successful in the program and in clinical practice. Development of a consensus-derived PA entrance exam would be a complex, expensive, and time-consuming endeavor, requiring considerable attention to technical issues of psychometric quality, process transparency, and legal defensibility. Changes being made to health professions admissions practices due to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the dropping of test scores as a requirement by some institutions, may make some of the issues raised in this paper more timely than ever.

Hypertension within the cardiovascular disease risk paradigm.

Hypertension remains a significant health issue not only for Americans but for the worldwide population. Elevated BP can not only be controlled but can be prevented, by addressing modifiable risk factors for CVD, including increased body weight, physical inactivity, poor dietary habits, alcohol consumption, and smoking. The challenge for the clinician is to reduce the global risk for CVD by preventing or at least delaying the onset ofmodifiable CVD risk factors, and, when pharmacologic intervention is warranted, managing hypertension aggressively in order to help patients achieve recommended BP goals.

Patient education: the role of the physician assistant and other allied health professionals.

The physician assistant (PA) has been on the leading edge in the development of midlevel health providers since the 1960s. As an allied health professional, PAs, along with nurse practitioners, midwives, nurse anesthetists, and others, emphasize patient education. Oftentimes, patient education can be introduced in the academic setting, but true learning comes with experience as a student in clinical training.Most people enter an allied health profession with a sincere interest in developing quality patient-provider relationships. The basis for these relationships is thoughtful time spent with patients, listening to them and gaining a true appreciation of their fears and concerns and a comprehension of ill health as well as ideal health.Allied health professionals are commonly employed in settings that emphasize the team approach in medicine. By offering a patient the variety of services that the team can give, the practice of medicine becomes holistic, and patient education is integrated very easily.