What Do You Know About The Physician Assistant Profession

In order to have an intelligent conversation about the Physician Assistant Profession, and where it came from, one must have some basic knowledge about what it is that is involved in a Physician Assistant Career. In short, a Physician Assistant is very much the same as a medical doctor without having the autonomy but performing the same type of services for patients.

Physician Assistants practice medicine much the same way that a licensed doctor does except that they have to work under the auspices of a licensed physician. These well trained professionals are charged with duties which allow them to advise patients in their choices of healthcare, diagnose diseases, assist surgeons during procedures, evaluate the status of patients, and write medical prescriptions.

Entering the healthcare profession in the realm of a Physician Assistant Career has some benefits that should be considered. Those who wish to get started practicing medicine right away without having to wait until they have gone through the many years of training it takes may wish to become a Physician Assistant. Salary is generally in the six figure range in many cases.

Now that we have the basics out of the way, we can go on to discuss where this profession originated.

Doctors and educators began to recognize that there was a void between the number of patients needing care and those physicians available to provide that care during the 1960s. This mid-decade discovery caused them to determine that it was time to implement some changes to the healthcare field. This led to the broadening of the scope of medical care.

Dr. Eugene Stead who was part of the Duke University Medical Center of North Carolina was the first to implement a Physician Assistant class in efforts to expand available medical care for the masses. This first class was made up Navy Corpsmen who already possessed a great deal of medical training gained from the time they spent serving their country in the military during the Vietnam War. This class benefitted from the faster paced physicians training which was used during World War II.

After Dr. Stead installed his program, two others, Dr. Hu Myers of the Alderson-Broaddus College and Dr. Richard Smith of the University of Washington also stepped in to train Physician Assistants. Once these programs proved their success, the American Medical Association determined it was time to set up guidelines for the education of PAs and also implemented the certification process.

To sum it all up, Physician Assistant Careers got their start from a simple need. The efforts of a very astute doctor who saw that there should be some way to close the gap between patients needing quality healthcare and doctors who were not able to be everywhere at the same time resulted in greater numbers of competent care providers allowing more care to be provided in a much faster span of time.

Physician Assistants provide a vital service which is particularly helpful since doctors are unable to be everywhere they are needed all the time.