AAMC undermining physician proffession

[allantois]

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Are these guys out of their minds stating things like:

"The US experience, now with over 200,000 nonphysician clinicians over 40 years, has demonstrated that both PA’s and NP’s deliver a high percentage of medical care services traditionally provided by physicians.
This service delivery has been shown to be similar, if not indistinguishable, from physician delivered care in terms of quality of care, cost-effectiveness, and patient care safety." (page 16)


Another quote:
"PAs and NPs have been shown to be effective substitutes for physician residents in US graduate medical education" (page 13).

https://www.aamc.org/download/185524/data/2011_pwc_cawley.pdf

Are they serious? PAs get paid 2x of residents' salary working half the time.

 

[hoihaie]

thats why not alot of people like family medicine or primary care

 

[otterxavier]

This is not an official policy statement from the AAMC, or anything of the like. It's a PowerPoint of a presentation given by a single PA as part of a 90-minute panel at the AAMC Physician Workforce Research Conference three years ago. Just because you found it on their website doesn't mean that it's a statement that the AAMC endorses and is committed to advancing.

 

[ridethecliche]

Some people go out of their way to look for things to get riled up about.

Kudos.

 

[NickNaylor]

The proliferation of PAs/NPs is a necessary consequence of things like duty hours. When your staff (in this case, residents) does not grow in size but the number of hours they can work is shrinks, the labor has to be made up somewhere. Enter PAs/MDs. They function exactly as they're supposed to in a hospital setting: roughly equivalent to residents while being overseen by attendings.

PAs/NPs working in the hospital don't undermine the role of physicians. If anything, it demonstrates that they are equivalent only to physicians-in-training (rather than fully independent physicians) and makes an argument for increasing the wages of residents to match similarly skilled personnel. Unfortunately there is no unified front to make this argument, but given the fact that hospitals pay midlevels $100k to do work equivalent to or less than that of a resident while paying the latter $50k and claiming that training has "significant costs," the hospital argument for keeping those Medicare outlays is becoming less and less tenable.