Moves and Milestones

Students and Faculty at DeSales PA Program Open Free Clinic, Gain the Attention of PBS. Spearheaded by second-year student Brett Feldman, faculty and students at the DeSales University PA Program in Allentown, Pennsylvania, have opened a free clinic in the city and been featured on the local PBS affiliate station, Channel 39. DeSales faculty and students raised funds and solicited equipment donations for the clinic, which opened in January, and also handled staffing, supplies, medication, malpractice coverage, and safety issues. The Allentown Rescue Mission provided free dedicated space for the clinic, allowing the mission to add a medical component to services already being offered to its 150 residents. Program director Christine Bruce said that the program wants to expand its services to other needy populations in the community. "We want the students and the community to experience the purity of having health care delivered without any financial strings,” she said.

The PBS feature on the clinic can be viewed at http://www.desales.edu/default.aspx?pageid=4281 [choose Tempo Video Segment].

Texas PA Educators to Be Awarded Doctoral Degrees: Venetia Orcutt, PhD, PA, director of the University of Texas Southwestern PA Program, and Linda Reed, EdD, PA, associate director of the University of North Texas PA Program in Fort Worth, have successfully defended their doctoral dissertations and are scheduled to be hooded on May 11. Both attended the University of North Texas in Denton. Orcutt's dissertation topic was "The Supply and Demand of Physician Assistants in the United States: A Trend Analysis," while Reed's tackled "Determining the Relationship between Motivation and Academic Outcomes among Students in the Health Professions."

Drs. Orcutt and Reed offer some tips to those considering a similar path:

• Find an area of study for which you have a passion, or at least one that helps you do what you do better.
• Be persistent; succeeding has less to do with intelligence than it has to do with perseverance.
• Take it one step at a time, keeping the end in mind. And always remember, it will take you longer than you expect, so be patient with yourself.
• Seek a mentor, someone who can provide the encouragement to persevere and who has been through the process to both empathize with and motivate you when you least want to go on.

Do you have news you'd like to share with other faculty members?

PAEA Networker's Moves and Milestones column is designed to help keep members informed about their colleagues’ activities. The column features information on faculty moves and promotions and on significant changes and achievements at member programs. Examples are faculty moving to new positions within the program or elsewhere, grants received, articles or books published, a new track or satellite campus established. We also welcome curricular innovations that may not have the research basis for peer-reviewed publication but that would be of anecdotal interest to PA faculty.

If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Eileen Evans, PAEA Networker managing editor, at eevans@PAEAonline.org; (703) 548-5538, ext. 307. News must be received by the 20th of the month for inclusion in the following month’s issue.