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- Jul 6, 2016
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400 hours of clinical contact sounds like a lot, but that's about what a medical student may get in less than 2 months. Anyone in the medical field knows that a medical student with 2 months of clinical experience is near useless with their clinical judgment, let alone an intern with 400 hours of clinical contact in residency (5 weeks) or even 700 (less than a season).
I want to add that I did my undergrad at a top 3 clinical psychology university (according to the USWNR however useless it is), and I remember being caught up in the idea that psychologists should prescribe these "relatively simple medications" for "straightforward conditions." Now after completing medical school and starting residency as an intern, I can see that it is definitely not true. Side effect profiles for almost any psychiatric drug are extremely far ranging (probably more so than most other drugs) and require significant medical knowledge and experience to handle.
So would you be ok with the granting of the prescription rights if they beefed up the training programs to be at least on par with a PA program?