Reflections from the National Association of Advisors for the Health Professions (NAAHP) Conference

By Patrick Knott, PhD, PA-C
APAP President Elect

During the last week of June, I had the opportunity to represent our Association at the National Association for the Advisors to the Health Professions (NAAHP) meeting in Washington, DC. The NAAHP is an important group of college professors and university advisors who counsel undergraduate students who are interested in health careers. Although we hear from our applicants that they heard about the PA Profession from a PA they met or from information they found on-line, these advisors are many times the unsung hero’s who help these undergrads get the right pre-requisites completed, write them letters of reference, and help them with their applications to our programs. Because of this, I think it is vitally important that we continue to develop our relationship with this group.

I met our new NAAHP representative, Chere Periera, from Oregon State University. She seems to be a delightful person to work with, and I hope you will all introduce yourselves to her at our Nashville meeting. We were also able to visit with Susan Gormely, who has finished her term in this position.

Several interesting things happened to me at this meeting. First, I was very happy that so many of these advisors had an interest in the PA profession. They are clearly seeing that their students are very interested in our programs. I got many, many questions about how best to prepare a student for PA school, and I found that they were genuinely trying to make their students into competitive applicants. This was great news.

I was concerned, however, with the level of questions that were being asked. Many were pretty basic questions about the profession, how long our programs were, whether they were at a graduate or undergraduate level, and how to find information about individual programs. I had hoped that these advisors already knew all of this, and would be asking more technical questions about how to increase the competitive advantage for their applicants. Their questions about medical school admission were much more advanced. This means that we have more work to do in disseminating information about the profession, our association, and our individual programs.

I attended the program with our Executive Director, Timi Agar Barwick. It was interesting to see that in one place in the program, she was listed as being from APAP, and in another place she was listed as a representative of AAPA. Of course, this was an innocent mistake in the program, but when we pointed it out it wasn’t clear to them that there was a difference between the two organizations. Here too, is an area where more work is needed. No one was confused about the difference between the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the American Medical Association (AMA), and we need to build the same type of identity for our Association. Your board of directors has been keenly aware of this over the last couple of years.

Finally, the last message I brought home from the meeting was that our applicant pool is still very frustrated by the “diversity” of undergraduate
pre-requisites that our programs require. Even those who just want to apply to a few programs find that they have to take a large number of different courses for each school. Several of our colleagues in the Association have looked at this issue in the past, and I think that it needs further discussion. Our goal should be to remove as many barriers as possible for the best and brightest students to be admitted to our programs.

I hope you are having a good summer, and I look forward to seeing all of you in Nashville!