It's official: Physician Associate (not Assistant).

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More confusion for patients.
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According to google, one of the three definitions for associate is: "A person with limited or subordinate membership of an organization." I think what we should do is call all PAs/NPs health care providers and then call physicians, physicians.

I think as physicians we should actually highlight this to make a point about how PAs care more about what they're called than the work they do. This person is acting like someone's life was actually bettered by this.

Also what is a house of delegates? Seems like something on the state level.
 
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Redpancreas said:
According to google, one of the three definitions for associate is: "A person with limited or subordinate membership of an organization." I think what we should do is call all PAs/NPs health care providers and then call physicians, physicians.

I think as physicians we should actually highlight this to make a point about how PAs care more about what they're called than the work they do. This person is acting like someone's life was actually bettered by this.

Also what is a house of delegates? Seems like something on the state level.
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Could be at a national meeting.
 
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Its a clear move to distance themselves from physicians so they can chase that independent practice dream that the NPs get to have.
 
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RadsWFA1900 said:
Its a clear move to distance themselves from physicians so they can chase that independent practice dream that the NPs get to have.
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They're using the word "physician" in there. Can we not in turn ask them to remove it. If they're not a nurse, not a physician-derivate, what are they? Let them figure it out. Resident Physicians who can't find jobs or Medical Students are who should be called Physician Associates. They can call themselves Provider Associates for all I care.
 
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Lawpy said:
How do Assistant Physicians and unmatched IMGs working in clinical jobs while trying to match react?
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Exactly. In my experience, their titles are often associates.
 
Lawpy said:
I'm just thinking what's stopping us from replacing midlevels with unmatched IMGs. Because i think a lot of countries have this model from earlier discussions
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Let's do it. The problem is going to be with licensing them as physicians because currently most need 2 years of residency experience in the US prior to that.
 
Lawpy said:
I'm just thinking what's stopping us from replacing midlevels with unmatched IMGs. Because i think a lot of countries have this model from earlier discussions
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It would open the floodgates for every doctor from Cairo to Manila to come scrambling over here and price both us and the midlevels out, that's what.
 
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Jackaleauxpe said:
It would open the floodgates for every doctor from Cairo to Manila to come scrambling over here and price both us and the midlevels out, that's what.
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They wouldn't be able to be board certified, but merely licensed. It's a huge difference. The pay should be between 100-120K based on experience. This would effectively end midlevels.

That pretty sharply demarcates the Asian continent. I've seen a lot of subtle comments on SDN about non-Western IMGs being inferior in training to UK or Australian medical students. If anyone actually thinks this, can ya'll outline why because I think the notion is absurd.
 
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There is one problem though. Midlevels are useful because they stay longer as opposed to transient nature of unmatched IMGs who will be reapplying in the match
 
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Redpancreas said:
I think what we should do is call all PAs/NPs health care providers and then call physicians, physicians.
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I work at a good-sized teaching hospital. I work with all sorts of “providers” but make it a point to say that I am a physician.
 
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Redpancreas said:
They wouldn't be able to be board certified, but merely licensed. It's a huge difference. The pay should be between 100-120K based on experience. This would effectively end midlevels.
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We have nurses with online degrees and no medical knowledge getting free practice authority. Pretty sure actual doctors willing to work for much less than US docs wouldn’t have problems once this became a thing.
 
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Lawpy said:
There is one problem though. Midlevels are useful because they stay longer as opposed to transient nature of unmatched IMGs who will be reapplying in the match
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The supply though! True that at many places the continuity would be difficult to turn down.
 
They spent millions of $$$ to come up with "Medical Care Practitioner." Only to go with the name they came up with before spending the money.

A race to the bottom, here we come!
 
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FutureSurgical said:
They spent millions of $$$ to come up with "Medical Care Practitioner." Only to go with the name they came up with before spending the money.

A race to the bottom, here we come!
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That wouldn’t have let them say they are PHYSICIAN associates. Mark my words. Their goal is to somehow make it so the associate becomes like a parenthetical that they just drop altogether and completely back door their way into being called physicians. How insecure are these people? Ffs.
 
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Redpancreas said:
They wouldn't be able to be board certified, but merely licensed. It's a huge difference. The pay should be between 100-120K based on experience. This would effectively end midlevels.

That pretty sharply demarcates the Asian continent. I've seen a lot of subtle comments on SDN about non-Western IMGs being inferior in training to UK or Australian medical students. If anyone actually thinks this, can ya'll outline why because I think the notion is absurd.
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It's rhetorical.
 
Next, they should do what the PTs did and change their degree to a doctorate. “Hi, I’m Dr. Jones, an internal medicine physician associate here at XYZ Hospital.” If that doesn’t achieve their ultimate goal of being consistently mistaken for physicians by patients, then I don’t know what will.
 
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I can already play out the conversation I am going to have with confused patients...

me: "so for your follow up visit you are going to see my physician associate"

Them: "oh so I am going to see another doctor?"

Me: "well no, they are an associate who works underneath a doctor's supervision and is covered by the doctors liability"

Them: "oh so they are an assistant?"

Me: "yes, wait No... they are a physician associate, not to be confused with an associate physician who actually is a doctor"
 
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Still a PA...I don't really care if it's assistant, associate, amigo, augmenter...whatever. This changes nothing from my practice perspective.

I guess the reason they favored using a replacement word starting with 'A', is that the term PA is already engrained in society. People know what a PA is. I could probably do a survey of my patients asking them what PA stands for...for all I know, some of them might say Physician associate right off the bat. heh. They just know them as 'PAs'.
 
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Like so many things, it is a noisy minority of "Advocates" who push for any changes. I don't believe a significant majority of CRNAs want independent practice as most are smart enough to recognize their limitations. My daughter in law is a PA, and very smart. I asked her to be one of my med students on several occasions and she declined stating she was happy just where she was. I also think we use mid levels incorrectly. I think the Dr should see patients first and the midlevel utilized for follow up. My sister in law had a navicular fracture missed by the PA. Plain films normal, but the Orthopedist would have a higher index of suspicion with continued pain and ordered a ct sooner.
 
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Angus Avagadro said:
Like so many things, it is a noisy minority of "Advocates" who push for any changes. I don't believe a significant majority of CRNAs want independent practice as most are smart enough to recognize their limitations. My daughter in law is a PA, and very smart. I asked her to be one of my med students on several occasions and she declined stating she was happy just where she was. I also think we use mid levels incorrectly. I think the Dr should see patients first and the midlevel utilized for follow up. My sister in law had a navicular fracture missed by the PA. Plain films normal, but the Orthopedist would have a higher index of suspicion with continued pain and ordered a ct sooner
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Another would be specialized care that is lower acuity. Our PAs see warts and acne...they are specialized in that regard and probably know more than I do regarding certain things (which meds and treatments are covered, etc). They actually will periodically bring up the fact that more complex patients are incorrectly being put on their schedule by the schedulers and that it's not supposed to be happening.
 
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Soon it'll turn out that that C in the "PA-C" stands for "can..."
 
Redpancreas said:
They wouldn't be able to be board certified, but merely licensed. It's a huge difference. The pay should be between 100-120K based on experience. This would effectively end midlevels.

That pretty sharply demarcates the Asian continent. I've seen a lot of subtle comments on SDN about non-Western IMGs being inferior in training to UK or Australian medical students. If anyone actually thinks this, can ya'll outline why because I think the notion is absurd.
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As a NZ student in the UK I imagine this would basically start to force a slow transformation of what is favourable criteria for residency selection/matching; basically I would expect the US system to eventually mimic the system in NZ/AUS/UK (idk how many years this would take but it'd be an interesting discussion). I've discussed the 'residency process' in these countries a lot on reddit but basically you can perpetually be stuck in PGYX because of the way our system works in that residencies are competitive within themselves, so not only is getting in competitive but so is advancing to PGYX.

Basically I imagine that suddenly not only would people who want to do Neurosurgery (or insert specialty here) have to do multiple research years but now they would most likely also need X years in the 'PA equivalent' position, like we have in NZ/AUS.

Most likely these PA positions would become 'pre-residency' positions.

Thoughts on this? Do you think the system would slowly morph into something like this? Because in short it ****ing sucks, nobody wants to do 10 years to become a Gen surg for example.

Edit: I don't mean morph into competitive for every year of residency but just that doing PA years will basically be a pre-req for competitive specialties.
 
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Matthew9Thirtyfive said:
Love how PHYSICIAN is huge and in bold. These people’s fragile egos know no bounds. I will still call them physician’s assistants.
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You can barely see the associate. I had to squint real hard. Seems like the title change was a huge win for them lol. It's quite obvious that the intention of the title change was to be seen as somewhat equal to a physicians, especially to patients who don't know better. The title change is them gearing up for independent practice.
 
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Ms Procrastinator said:
You can barely see the associate. I had to squint real hard. Seems like the title change was a huge win for them lol. It's quite obvious that the intention of the title change was to be seen as somewhat equal to a physicians, especially to patients who don't know better. The title change is them gearing up for independent practice.
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They literally spent over a million dollars deciding on “medical care practitioner” and then still went with physician associate. It’s so transparent. I don’t know how people fall for this ****. Sometimes I feel like the inmates are running the asylum.
 
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Matthew9Thirtyfive said:
They literally spent over a million dollars deciding on “medical care practitioner” and then still went with physician associate. It’s so transparent. I don’t know how people fall for this ****. Sometimes I feel like the inmates are running the asylum.
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The title "PA" is kinda already ingrained in people's mind. They probably realized that it would be harder to get people to call them "medical care practitioner" since people are already used to PA. Plus, in keeping the PA initials they could just correct people and say associates instead of assistant. You're right though, term "practitioner" wouldn't give them the satisfaction the term "Physician" would. It's easier to confuse patients with the word "Physician".
 
Redpancreas said:
non-Western IMGs being inferior in training to UK or Australian medical students. If anyone actually thinks this, can ya'll outline why because I think the notion is absurd.
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I know you mentioned Asia, but if you consider ex-Soviet Bloc countries "non-Western," then the training can be quite different, even in the past decade or so. For example, at the Harvard Medical School of the Czech Republic (Charles University First Faculty), 10-30 medical students are assigned to ONE patient for rotations. During rounds, the attending crams dozens of med students around the patient's bed as the teaching case for the day. That clinical experience is vastly different from the US and objectively inferior.

But I don't want to derail this thread from the fact that...

People saying that we should trust PA's more than NP's looking real silly right now.
 
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@Matthew9Thirtyfive "I went to two years of medical school, you bet your a** that physician title is staying!" 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣. Seems like rocky is saying that his education earned him the right to the title "Physician" and Sara feels she practically went to med school. Oh well



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It makes no sense that physician is in the title anymore. It did when they were the physician ASSISTANT. Couldn't we argue that NPs, MAs, scribes, are also physician associates? lol

Nevertheless, I dont think it really matters... they all use PA like it doesnt stand for anything anyway and patients will either not know it changed, not care, or thought they were physician associates in the first place
 
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There is a war going on right now in the edits for the "Physician Assistant Associate Assistant" Wikipedia page:clown:
 
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jambro said:
It makes no sense that physician is in the title anymore. It did when they were the physician ASSISTANT. Couldn't we argue that NPs, MAs, scribes, are also physician associates? lol

Nevertheless, I dont think it really matters... they all use PA like it doesnt stand for anything anyway and patients will either not know it changed, not care, or thought they were physician associates in the first place
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The normal ones do say PA. The ones who are fighting for it are probably walking around saying "Physician associate"

It's like that time where I worked as secretary in the hospital and put a "Medical student" sticker on my badge, made with a labeler.
 
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Ms Procrastinator said:
@Matthew9Thirtyfive "I went to two years of medical school, you bet your a** that physician title is staying!" 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣. Seems like rocky is saying that his education earned him the right to the title "Physician" and Sara feels she practically went to med school. Oh well



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It’s hilarious. These people are so delusional.
 
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I think Practitioner Associate would be great, vague, still a PA, and doesn't get confused with physicians.
 
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The scary part is that I once asked one of our instructors about differences in course curriculum between our program and the PA program, and the answer I got was almost like they have more respect for PA students and care more about them. The logic was superficially ok - “they’ll be out and practicing right after they’re done. You guys have years to learn that stuff.”
 
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A-Fib said:
The scary part is that I once asked one of our instructors about differences in course curriculum between our program and the PA program, and the answer I got was almost like they have more respect for PA students and care more about them. The logic was superficially ok - “they’ll be out and practicing right after they’re done. You guys have years to learn that stuff.”
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What a simp. These people are only empowering them.
 
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A-Fib said:
The scary part is that I once asked one of our instructors about differences in course curriculum between our program and the PA program, and the answer I got was almost like they have more respect for PA students and care more about them. The logic was superficially ok - “they’ll be out and practicing right after they’re done. You guys have years to learn that stuff.”
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Why is that sellout teaching in med school and contributing to the rot of med education?

Oh wait i forgot.

Admins. It's always those useless malignant admins, who get full support from several simping med students
 
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Lawpy said:
Why is that sellout teaching in med school and contributing to the rot of med education?

Oh wait i forgot.

Admins. It's always those useless malignant admins, who get full support from several simping med students
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It’s not just admins. Plenty of academic physicians love midlevels because they do all the stuff they don’t want to do so they can sit in their offices and collect a paycheck while their army of midlevels mismanages their patients.
 
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Matthew9Thirtyfive said:
It’s not just admins. Plenty of academic physicians love midlevels because they do all the stuff they don’t want to do so they can sit in their offices and collect a paycheck while their army of midlevels mismanage their patients.
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Why are they teaching med students and residents? Why not remove them from teaching service? Are med schools really that short staffed that they can't find capable attendings without relying on useless sellouts?
 
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Lawpy said:
Why are they teaching med students and residents? Why not remove them from teaching service? Are med schools really that short staffed that they can't find capable attendings without relying on useless sellouts?
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I have yet to experience any of it at my school’s sites, but I know friends at other schools who have plenty of attendings who are clearly there for the prestige of academics and/or the research opportunities.
 
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