About Aapa Physician Assistant
In the 1960s a need developed for a new type of health professional, an individual that was both more and less than a traditional MD-The Physician's Assistant.
Here was an individual could could spend more time with a patient and who was authorized to do many of things a traditional medical doctor might be asked to do.
The need for Physician's Assistants developed as more medical doctor's went into specialized areas of practice such as dermatology, and the the geographic distribution of physicians made it more difficult for patient's to get the care they needed.
There was a call for a practitioner much more advanced, much more than a medical assistant (medical assistants only perform administrative and and some clinical tasks.) The Aapa Physician Assistant would be trained and licensed to practice medicine on a national level under the direct supervision of licensed physician.
Dr. Eugene Stead of the Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina assembled the first class of PAs in 1965. Many of his students were former U.S. Navy hospital corpsmen and U.S. Army combat medics, who had received a large amount of medical training during their military service and gained valuable experience during the Vietnam War. He based the curriculum of the PA program in part on his first-hand knowledge of the fast-track training of medical doctors during World War II.Here was a visionary concept of a system for taking individuals whose military training could be used to serve their country in the civilian sector as well.
Over the last forty years, as the PA profession has expanded and medical science has become more sophisticated the educational requirements have expanded.
The education is generalist in approach, consisting of classroom and laboratory instruction in medical and behavioral sciences, such as anatomy, hematology,pathophysiology, pharmacology,microbiology, pathology, clinical medicine, and physical diagnosis, followed by clinical rotations in internal medicine, family medicine, surgery, oncology,pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, emergency medicine, and geriatric medicine, as well as elective rotations. Unlike medical doctors, who must complete a minimum of three years of residency after completion of medical schools, PAs are not required to complete such residencies.Even so, there are residency programs in certain specialties for PAs who may wish to continue formal education in such a format.
Professional Designations and Associations:
A Physician's Assistant may use various designations after their name and may join with others who have a similar background in different associations.
The use of "PA-C" for example is limited sonly to those PAs currently certified and in compliance with the regulations of the national certifying organization, the National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants (NCCPA).
The premier association for PAs is American Academy of Physician Assistants.
As of May 2008, there were 141 PA programs in the United States [2] accredited by the Accreditation Review Commission on Education for the Physician Assistant (ARC-PA).
The Duke University Medical Center Archives has established the Physician Assistant History Center, dedicated to the study, preservation, and presentation of the history of the PA profession.
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