Members Elect Officers, Approve New Mission Statement at Annual Meeting

By Steven Lane

Genetics, recruiting strategies, and interprofessionalism were a few of the recurring themes at APAP’s annual Education Forum in Nashville, Tennessee, in November. More than 300 PA educators gathered in the Music City for four days of professional education and for elections, meetings, and the ongoing business of the Association.

Kicking off the meeting, keynote speaker Michael Welch, a British-trained neurologist and now president of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago, told a standing room-only crowd that they were in the midst of a genetics-driven medical revolution: “We are moving from diagnosis and treatment to prediction and prevention,” Welch said. “Soon,” he added, “medical professionals will deliver a baby and be able to know almost immediately that the child will have a heart attack at 50.” Reviewing the broader medical landscape, he noted the high error rates, often caused by communication problems, reported recently by the Institute of Medicine and others and stressed interprofessional education as the key to developing a better team approach in medicine and overcoming these problems.

The number of genetics and genomics workshops on the program showed that PA faculty have already taken to heart Welch’s warning about the genetics revolution. “That train has already left the station, and we need to catch up to get on it,” said Michael Rackover in his presentation on incorporating medical genomics into PA curricula. Rackover has been a longtime advocate of genetics education and was recently appointed to the board of the National Coalition for Health Professional Education in Genetics. Rackover stressed the importance of taking a family history of patients. Several other workshops addressed various aspects of bringing faculty up to date on medical genetics education.

A number of workshops addressed issues surrounding the recruitment of minority and disadvantaged PA students. Most stressed the need to get students from these groups into the pipeline early; finding quality applicants from college and even high school populations can be difficult, presenters said. Other strategies are to reduce financial barriers and give more weight in admissions to nontraditional criteria like personal characteristics and obstacles overcome, rather than standardized tests and grades. In one presentation, faculty members from Pacific University in Oregon discussed their work with a Kids into Health Careers grant from the Bureau of Health Professions. Using faculty and students to go into local high schools had generated enthusiasm for the PA profession, the presenters found.

APAP has also been working on this issue at the association level: The APAP National Recruitment Strategies Task Force has been collecting data and developing strategies on recruiting underrepresented minority students for the past year. The task force is expected to present its final report to the APAP board in January.

Data and Trends
In a public general session, Ted Ruback, chair of the CASPA Advisory Committee, presented data from the third year of the Association’s Central Application Service for Physician Assistants. The number of participating programs in 2004 had increased from 68 to 80 (of 133 accredited programs in the nation), Ruback said, and the number of total applications from 18,906 to 23,702. The number of applications per available seat was steady at about 2.05. Student demographics were largely unchanged, except that the percentage of male applicants had increased from 22.5 percent in 2003 to 28 percent in 2004.

Following Ruback, Bert Simon, director of the APAP annual report project, presented the latest data on applicants and students. After several years of declining applications, the average number of applicants per program rose for the second straight year, Simon reported. Most other indicators remained fairly steady, with the recent trends toward younger applicants and a high proportion of females, continuing. The percentage of programs offering master’s degrees continues to rise, up to 62 percent of programs when data were gathered in 2003. The rate at which the overall number of programs is increasing is tapering off, Simon noted.

Business Meeting
In their annual election of officers, APAP members voted in Dawn Morton-Rias, dean of the College of Health Related Professions at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, as president elect. Walter Eisenhauer, director of the Lock Haven University PA Program in Pennsylvania, was re-elected as director at large. They join incoming president Patrick Knott, past president Paul Lombardo, secretary/treasurer Dana Sayre-Stanhope, director at large Justine Strand, and student representative Raylene Lawrence. One of the primary tasks of this board, addressed by both Morton-Rias and Eisenhauer in their platform statements, will be to oversee the Association’s continuing transition to independent management, scheduled to be completed by mid-2006. APAP is currently managed under contract by the AAPA.

Two motions were passed. The first was from the Committee on Ethnic and Cultural Diversity, charging the APAP board to ask ARC-PA to adopt specific standards addressing diversity among PA students and faculty, as well as cultural competency curriculum. The membership also passed a motion putting into place new vision, mission, and value statements. “This new mission statement clearly reflects the direction in which APAP has been moving over the last several years and will help guide us to the type of success that the Association deserves,” said Patrick Knott.

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