500hrs direct care for PA school?

[velocicaur]

Hello,

I have looked at some of the requirements for the various health fields I am interested in, but something about the physician assistant requirements seems odd. The program at my school requires "500-plus" hours of direct patient care. Another school, less than 2 hours from the previous, requires "100 direct hours" - "obtain strong direct patient care experience, students need to become certified in the following, for example: athletic trainer, exercise physiologist, radiologic technologist, paramedic, nurse's aide, phlebotomist, medical lab technician, emergency medical technician (I or basic), licensed practical nurse, RN, or foreign medical graduate" (http://www.cmich.edu/chp/x911.xml).

I understand that they want people to get a feel for the health field, but why are the requirements so strict for the PA field? I realize that 100 hours (2.5 weeks full time) and 500 hours is 3 months full time and is not a whole lot of time in the scheme of things, but still, pretty strict.

Thanks

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[primadonna22274]

The only thing that's ODD about 500 hours is that it's so WEAK.

I was at the low end of experience with 4000 hours when I applied to PA school in 97. Many in my class had 5-10 years or more.

You have to understand the history of the PA profession that was built on significant prior medical experience (corpsman, RN, RT, paramedic) to see why it's still a requirement among most respected programs. The newer programs often require less experience, and there are a handful that require none, and those of us in the biz have serious concerns about those programs.

Please, if you're interested in PA, educate yourself about its roots. Go to www.aapa.org and read up. There's also an excellent PA History website whose URL escapes me at the moment but it's operated by Duke and is worth reading.

 

[bradt9881]

http://www.pahx.org/

that's the history link I think you referenced.

As far as experience goes, 500 hours is low; I had 20 years of military medic experience prior to acceptance. Nobody should have to have that much, but 3 months? In 3 months, you can barely learn where the bathroom is in a hospital, let alone how to do patient care....

 

[primadonna22274]

Thanks Brad, that's what I wanted.
And yeah...3 months is weak....

http://www.pahx.org/

that's the history link I think you referenced.

As far as experience goes, 500 hours is low; I had 20 years of military medic experience prior to acceptance. Nobody should have to have that much, but 3 months? In 3 months, you can barely learn where the bathroom is in a hospital, let alone how to do patient care....

 

[deleted6669]

better programs require> 1000 hrs, many as much as 4000 hrs+
I was an er tech for 5 yrs then a paramedic for 5 yrs before becoming a pa. when I went through my pa program I was one of the youngest and LEAST experienced in my class.....
the avg age in my class was 35 with many folks in their 40's and 50's.
pa is a SECOND MEDICAL CAREER. meant to follow prior training and experience in another health care field. pa training builds on this prior training and experience.
the place for those without any prior experience is medical school.....
from a top program, check this out:
http://www.washington.edu/medicine/som/depts/medex/applicants/mchs_prerequisites.htm

last yrs accepted class actually had an avg of 8000 prior hrs...4000 hrs only gets you an interview.....also look at the bottom of the page about what they consider acceptable types of experience....these are medical careers......

 

[FourMoreYears]

You can find programs that are not as strict on the healthcare requirement. This will not be to your advantage in PA school. You are expected to learn a lot and perform at a high level. Without the clinical hours, you will be behind the curve.

But like it or not my fellow PAs, this is going to be a growing trend. With 140+ programs and growing, there are going to be more and more students entering with limited clinical experience. Can you blame them? Why take a job making 15-30 grand a year to get experience for Joe Blow PA school when you can make at least triple the salary graduating from Joanne Blow PA school that isn't as strict on the prior experience. This person is loosing 50 + grand a year just to get experience. I'm not saying I approve of having less clinical hours. It's just a growing fact that more and more people are choosing not to have it.

 

[primadonna22274]

I know, as much as we bemoan this trend, it's happening. That ship has sailed. I'm very soon going to be teaching in a well-established and respected program that, I was shocked to find out, is on the low end for required health care hours. One of the old-school PAs confided to me during my interview that lots of the "kids" have "zero" hours. I didn't think that was possible, and I'm not (yet) privy to the admissions data, but we'll see. I suppose it's the wave of the future....

You can find programs that are not as strict on the healthcare requirement. This will not be to your advantage in PA school. You are expected to learn a lot and perform at a high level. Without the clinical hours, you will be behind the curve.

But like it or not my fellow PAs, this is going to be a growing trend. With 140+ programs and growing, there are going to be more and more students entering with limited clinical experience. Can you blame them? Why take a job making 15-30 grand a year to get experience for Joe Blow PA school when you can make at least triple the salary graduating from Joanne Blow PA school that isn't as strict on the prior experience. This person is loosing 50 + grand a year just to get experience. I'm not saying I approve of having less clinical hours. It's just a growing fact that more and more people are choosing not to have it.

 

[deleted6669]

You can find programs that are not as strict on the healthcare requirement. This will not be to your advantage in PA school. You are expected to learn a lot and perform at a high level. Without the clinical hours, you will be behind the curve.

But like it or not my fellow PAs, this is going to be a growing trend. With 140+ programs and growing, there are going to be more and more students entering with limited clinical experience. Can you blame them? Why take a job making 15-30 grand a year to get experience for Joe Blow PA school when you can make at least triple the salary graduating from Joanne Blow PA school that isn't as strict on the prior experience. This person is loosing 50 + grand a year just to get experience. I'm not saying I approve of having less clinical hours. It's just a growing fact that more and more people are choosing not to have it.

As someone who hires pa's I don't hire folks from low quality programs. I know the difference and so do most chief pa's out there. there are programs I won't even precept for due to the consistently low quality of their students.....
I think we are starting to see a divergence in the quality of pa grads. there are grads with prior experience who go to programs with realistic entry requirements and those without experience who go to low quality programs that accept anyone. first choice jobs go to grads of the quality programs and the other folks work at wt loss ctrs and for minute clinics at walmart....I envision the lower tier programs going to 3 yrs to make up for this and in an effort to get some more experience into their grads while in school....i'm guessing the first civilian dpa program will follow this model: bs with no experience plus 3 yrs= dpa.
these dpa's will still not be as good as the grads coming out of traditional programs but the grad schools will make an extra yr of tuition so these programs will flourish....

 

[core0]

Hello,

I have looked at some of the requirements for the various health fields I am interested in, but something about the physician assistant requirements seems odd. The program at my school requires "500-plus" hours of direct patient care. Another school, less than 2 hours from the previous, requires "100 direct hours" - "obtain strong direct patient care experience, students need to become certified in the following, for example: athletic trainer, exercise physiologist, radiologic technologist, paramedic, nurse's aide, phlebotomist, medical lab technician, emergency medical technician (I or basic), licensed practical nurse, RN, or foreign medical graduate" (http://www.cmich.edu/chp/x911.xml).

I understand that they want people to get a feel for the health field, but why are the requirements so strict for the PA field? I realize that 100 hours (2.5 weeks full time) and 500 hours is 3 months full time and is not a whole lot of time in the scheme of things, but still, pretty strict.

Thanks

Despite what you will read here the profession has always had diverse views on the subject. Of the first 10 programs 2 did not require medical experience and 2 recommended medical experience. The others required various amounts of medical experience or were only open to medical corpsman.

The facts are that there is no correlation between success on the PANCE and medical experience. There also appears to be no difference in salaries between graduates of schools that require medical experience and those that don't. If you look at the program guide it breaks down to roughly 1/3 of programs require no medical experience, 1/3 recommend medical experience and 1/3 require medical experience (with a range from 50-4000 hours). So even within the educational field there is a wide variety in requirements. There is also significant latitude in what constitutes health care experience.

Given all these variables programs have developed methods that work well for each individual program. Some programs feel that they produce better PAs (or more easily trained PAs) with HCE. Others feel that there is no difference. The answer probably lies somewhere in between. Short of a medical degree any knowledge that HCE gives you will quickly be subsumed by the mass of information presented in the first year of PA school. Similarly any advantage in knowledge of health care systems is rapidly eclipsed by the changing nature of the clinical year.

Bottom line if you have HCE you will be able to apply to more PA programs. But there are many programs that do not require HCE and their graduates do not have trouble finding jobs (and despite what is posted here, they don't all suck). You will find the requirement for HCE regionally variable for the most part.

David Carpenter, PA-C

 

[gonj]

Hello,

I have looked at some of the requirements for the various health fields I am interested in, but something about the physician assistant requirements seems odd. The program at my school requires "500-plus" hours of direct patient care. Another school, less than 2 hours from the previous, requires "100 direct hours" - "obtain strong direct patient care experience, students need to become certified in the following, for example: athletic trainer, exercise physiologist, radiologic technologist, paramedic, nurse's aide, phlebotomist, medical lab technician, emergency medical technician (I or basic), licensed practical nurse, RN, or foreign medical graduate" (http://www.cmich.edu/chp/x911.xml).

I understand that they want people to get a feel for the health field, but why are the requirements so strict for the PA field? I realize that 100 hours (2.5 weeks full time) and 500 hours is 3 months full time and is not a whole lot of time in the scheme of things, but still, pretty strict.

Thanks

Lucky you. The local programs I am looking at require 2000 hrs (1 yr full time).

I found a couple others that have no healthcare requirement but one has terrible licensing exam pass rates; the other requires an upper divi$ion $cience clas$ I couldn't take at the local community college.

 

[deleted6669]

you will find when looking around that anyone complaining about not passing the pa national board exam and anyone complaining about not being able to find a job went to a low tier/direct entry program without an experience requirement....prior to 1996 the board exam was a week long exam with 3 written and 3 practical portions that weeded out folks who should not be in practice. now it's 3 hrs at a computer terminal....pathetic....I'm not impressed with it as an entry level exam anymore, so when low tier/direct entry programs talk about pass rates equivalent to better programs this is a meaningless stat as anyone should pass this if they attended any program and attended even a portion of their lectures....the funny thing is we dropped the clinical component to be more like medical schools which since then have ADDED a clinical component but we didn't add ours back in....
it's funny that folks are all up in arms about direct entry np/dnp programs but no one seems to care that our profession seems to be headed in the same direction of allowing folks with just a prior science bs degree to enter our ranks without any experience whatsoever....