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Association Responds to CGFNS
Proposed Standards
By Steven Lane
The Physician Assistant Education Association has reviewed
the proposed standards for a developing visa screening process for
foreign-trained physician assistants and provided its input to the
agency overseeing the process. In December, the PAEA Board of Directors,
with input from the Federal Affairs Council, sent a detailed list
of comments to the International Commission on Healthcare Professions
(ICHP), the agency charged by the federal government with developing
standards for evaluating applicants to its new physician assistant
screening process — VisaScreen™. ICHP is a division of the Commission
on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools, which by statute is responsible
for developing the screening program. The standards themselves were
developed by the Physician Assistant Standards Committee, an advisory
group of PA educators and admissions personnel that has included at
different times PAs Sherry Stolberg, Dawn Morton-Rias, Laura Stuetzer,
Geraldine Buck, Brown Manning, Bill Stanhope, and Marvis Lary, as
well as Ana Nunez, MD; Joel Chinitz, MD; and Christine Greb.
The ICHP standards are intended to ensure that PA education
obtained outside the United States is comparable to American PA education.
Based to some extent on the standards of the Accreditation Review
Commission on Education for the Physician Assistant, they cover academic
prerequisites, accreditation of the educational institution, didactic
coursework, clinical skills, clinical rotations, and English proficiency.
The standards also require that the PA applicant be licensed as a
PA in the applicant’s home country.
The proposed standards were sent to all PA faculty in
November, with a request for review and comment. Approximately 20
faculty members responded with comments, which were reviewed and compiled
into a document for the board by the Federal Affairs Council, chaired
by David Asprey. This document was then sent to ICHP. Comments covered
all areas of the proposed standards; most focused on clarifying the
language of the standards to make interpretation and implementation
easier and on ensuring that the education of applicants is in fact
comparable to the education that US PA students receive.
It is important to note that a foreign-trained PA who
receives a visa through this process is not eligible to practice as
a PA in the United States. He or she would still have to attend an
accredited US PA program and pass the Physician Assistant National
Certifying Examination in the normal way.
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