Using the Core Competencies for New Physician Assistant Graduates to Prioritize Admission Criteria for PA Practice in 2025.

In a fast-changing medical and educational environment, it is incumbent upon the physician assistant (PA) education community to periodically consider what the future practice environment might look like for our graduates. Changes in technology, regulation, reimbursement, health system economics, and health care delivery are among the many forces shaping the practice environment of the future. The 2018 Physician Assistant Education Association (PAEA) Presidents Commission reflected on what PA practice might look like in 2025 and used the Association's Core Competencies for New PA Graduates to consider what characteristics might therefore be required of the PA graduates who will practice in this future. We postulate that the future PA practice environment will require enhanced skills in such areas as interpreting technology-driven clinical data for patients and practices, consulting effectively with increasingly specialized members of health care teams, understanding population health and predictive analytics, and knowing how to access and critically assess new medical information. Working backward, we identify certain noncognitive attributes that will likely need to be prioritized in our admission processes and suggest some tools that can be used to assess them. These attributes include ethical responsibility, communication, critical thinking, situational judgment, and professionalism. As with all Presidents Commission articles, this piece is intended primarily to stimulate thought, dialogue, and future research. We encourage all faculty to participate in this dialogue, through the new PAEA Digital Learning Hub (https://paealearning.org/learn/digital-learning-hub/) and other channels.

Noncognitive Attributes in Physician Assistant Education.

Physician assistant (PA) admissions processes have typically given more weight to cognitive attributes than to noncognitive ones, both because a high level of cognitive ability is needed for a career in medicine and because cognitive factors are easier to measure. However, there is a growing consensus across the health professions that noncognitive attributes such as emotional intelligence, empathy, and professionalism are important for success in clinical practice and optimal care of patients. There is also some evidence that a move toward more holistic admissions practices, including evaluation of noncognitive attributes, can have a positive effect on diversity. The need for these noncognitive attributes in clinicians is being reinforced by changes in the US health care system, including shifting patient demographics and a growing emphasis on team-based care and patient satisfaction, and the need for clinicians to help patients interpret complex medical information. The 2016 Physician Assistant Education Association Stakeholder Summit revealed certain behavioral and affective qualities that employers of PAs value and sometimes find lacking in new graduates. Although there are still gaps in the evidence base, some tools and technologies currently exist to more accurately measure noncognitive variables. We propose some possible strategies and tools that PA programs can use to formalize the way they select for noncognitive attributes. Since PA programs have, on average, only 27 months to educate students, programs may need to focus more resources on selecting for these attributes than teaching them.

Reinventing the Wheel: One Program's Approach to Redesign of Didactic Courses.

Curriculum and course redesign are expected and intentional efforts in health professions education. For physician assistant (PA) education, ongoing program self-assessment is a required accreditation standard and may guide deliberate changes within curriculum. The purpose of this article is to describe one PA program's approach to the redesign of 4 courses into 3 courses that span the entire didactic phase. Significant lessons learned include the importance of planning ahead, identifying key players, documenting the process as part of ongoing self-assessment, competency mapping, and being prepared to make real-time modifications and changes based on course evaluations and faculty feedback. Our approach and guiding principles to the successful redesign of the didactic courses may provide both established and new PA educational programs with useful methods to apply in their own unique curricula.

The physician assistant teaching fellowship: A model for faculty recruitment.

PURPOSE: the rapid growth of the number of physician assistant (PA) programs in the last two decades has resulted in a heightened demand for qualified and experienced PA faculty. Barriers to recruitment and retention of faculty include the need for diverse teaching experiences and the lack of available mentors. METHODS: in order to provide a structured experience for training potential faculty for careers as PA educators and to address the barriers to recruitment and retention of new faculty, our institution has offered a PA teaching fellowship since 1998. RESULTS: the teaching fellowship has met its goal of increasing the pool of qualified PA faculty, as nine of the 11 graduates were hired full-time into PA teaching and program administration positions. Curriculum projects developed by the fellows have been incorporated into our curriculum and have been shared with other PA programs. CONCLUSIONS: the PA teaching fellowship is a valuable strategy for developing teaching skills, promoting professionalism among PA educators, increasing the pool of available and qualified PA faculty, and overcoming barriers to retention. This model may be useful to other institutions.