PA Provost Brings Teamwork Skills to a New Position

Steven Lane

Over the past decade or so, many PAs and PA educators have moved into positions as deans and assistant deans, a sign of the profession’s maturation, growth, and increasing acceptance in the academic world. One PA educator has gone a step further: Doug Southard is likely the only PA in the country who has attained the rank of provost, the chief academic officer of a college or university. Southard is provost at Jefferson College of Health Sciences in Roanoke, Virginia, a private college in the southwest corner of the state that educates nearly 1,000 students in about a dozen undergraduate health professions programs in nursing, occupational therapy, and, of course, PA studies. He was the founding director of the PA program there, in 1996; and after a hiatus in the private research sector, returned to academia in 2004 as dean for academic affairs and student services at Jefferson. In 2005 he was named provost.

His position entails, he says, “a lot of meetings, working with committees. A lot of meet and greet.” Southard works on developing new programs, researching the market for them, and investigating their financial feasibility, as well as overseeing curriculum for the college’s current programs. Being a PA is good preparation for his current job because of the profession’s emphasis on team work. An important ability, he says, is “being able to work across disciplines and work in a team. People bring different backgrounds and approaches to their work, and it’s good to be able to bring people together and find consensus. I like to foster a sense of a community of learning. We all have something to learn from each other.”

The current director of the Jefferson PA Program, Wilton Kennedy, agrees. “Being a PA you interact with so many health professionals — from physicians to respiratory techs.” he said, “It gives you an ability to appreciate what is involved in other health professions.”

Kennedy said he enjoys having a PA in Southard’s position. “So often there is not an appreciation of the work it takes to run a PA program,” he says. “Other programs don’t have students scattered over such a wide area and are not so dependent on clinical preceptors that are not faculty.” And Kennedy’s program has a more competitive admissions process than his colleagues’, with more than 400 applications for 40 slots.

Southard’s interdisciplinary approach is finding tangible form in an upcoming reorganization of the college’s clinical lab space, which will be organized according to the function of the student’s future job rather than the discipline the student is training for. There will be space designed to simulate an operating room, an inpatient setting, an outpatient clinic, and typical home and office environments. Students from PA, nursing, respiratory therapy, occupational therapy, and medicine will all train together using simulated patients and high-tech mannequins.

Southard is also able to employ his research background to good effect in helping PA and other faculty to enhance their research and other scholarly skills. “Undergraduate faculty are often very focused on the classroom and may not be accustomed to doing research,” he said. “It’s been a challenge. But I have been where they are and have an appreciation for that challenge. I like the opportunity to enhance scholarship and provide a supportive role as they make the transition to serving as graduate-level faculty.”

Southard’s CV details a rich and varied career. After a few years as a naval hospital corpsman, he became a PA in 1978, when he graduated from the Johns Hopkins program in Baltimore (no longer in existence). He immediately went to work for the Coronary Primary Prevention Trial then underway at Hopkins, doing history and physicals on study participants and working with them on med compliance. This work stimulated an interest in the behavioral aspects of disease and prevention and led him to seek higher degrees, which he earned with some regularity, beginning with a master’s in public health from Hopkins in 1982. This was followed by an MS in education from Hopkins and in 1986 a PhD in clinical psychology from Virginia Tech, which included a year’s internship at Duke University Medical Center. His primary research interest was in the effects of stress and anger on heart disease.

In 1987 he took a faculty position at Virginia Tech and focused his research and clinical practice on the behavioral and psychophysiological aspects of cardiac rehabilitation. In 2004, he was elected president of the American Association of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation, an organization he admires for its interdisciplinary approach. That same year he moved back to Jefferson as dean and eventually provost.

For Kennedy, it has been both a blessing and a curse to have the founding director of the PA program as his provost. “Sometimes I think he hammers me a little harder than the rest,” he said, laughing. “He goes out of his way to avoid the appearance of favoritism.” But if Kennedy has questions about the rationale behind a policy on the books at the PA program, he can ask Southard about it. “He has a lot of institutional knowledge. And he can usually explain the reasoning. Of course, if it turns out it was a bad idea he pretends it was someone else’s.”