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Physician Assistant Essay

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Origins of the Physician Assistant Career
Physician assistants (PAs) are a significant part of the nation’s health care workforce. As licensed clinicians capable of performing multiple therapeutic and diagnostic tasks, PAs currently work across different medical care specialties. Therefore, it is imperative to understand the factors led to the development of the PA profession including, social catalysts, its founding characters, and the career’s initial philosophy.
In 1965, due to a scarcity of primary care providers, the first educational program for PAs was established at Duke University (Bodenheimer & Cramback, 2009). The society was in need of a new type of medical provider. Therefore, Duke University PA program’s intent was to mainly solve the issue in primary care workforce by educating midlevel providers. The first PA graduates in the nation were medically trained individuals with military background (Gerrie & Holbrook, 2013). …show more content…

Thelma Ingles, a registered nurse, and Dr. Eugene A, Stead, were the pioneers of Duke MSN program in 1958 (Pollitt & Raesman, 2011). Both wanted to bring a solution to the imminent shortage of clinicians during the 1950’s and 1960’s. However, due to inability to obtain program accreditation, the program soon closed and Stead shifted his perspective from training nurses to training military corpsmen.
According to Kent (2010), in 1965, Stead admitted and trained the first class of PAs consisting of former Navy corpsmen. The PA students were trained under a medical education model, to effectively provide health services. Two years later (1967), the first class of PAs consisting of three clinicians graduated. The initial role of PAs was to improve and expand health care at a primary care level. Nonetheless, over the years, the function of PAs in health care evolved

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