New York Times Praises Physician Assistants

Posted By: Paul   |   PA Profession   |   0 Comments

Last week’s New York Times included a very positive article about the PA field: The Physician Assistant Will See You, which was both great publicity for PA’s and sign of growing trust in this exploding profession.

Like most articles on physician assistants, it included a description of what exactly a PA is and how to become one. But rather than stopping there, it then pushed ahead to praise the physician assistants as crucial to quality and cost-effective health care in the US. The American Academy of Physician Assistants’ (AAPA) website called the article, which quoted AAPA Secretary-Treasurer Josanne Pagel, MPAS, PA-C, “overwhelmingly positive.”

But the article was not completely positive. Two physicians’ concerns about the use of PAs were quoted — one on the limited training in psychiatry that PA’s receive, and one on the increasing frequency with which PAs perform Plastic Surgery procedures (which implied this was a risk to patients).

If you haven’t read the article, I encourage you to - the New York Times has great cultural influence, and its praise amounts to endorsement of the profession.