Becoming Leaders in Medical Education

Dana Sayre-Stanhope, EdD, PA-C
President Elect

For the past several issues of the Networker, board members have been writing about the strategic plan which has emerged over the past nine months. Because it will set the direction for the Association over the next five to 10 years, I would like to take a few minutes of your time to explore one issue in slightly greater depth, with the hope of facilitating a lively discussion at our upcoming Education Forum in Tucson. We plan to set aside some time at the PA Educators Open Forum session for a brief presentation and discussion of the strategic plan and will make it available to the membership well before then.

One of the challenges we face as a board and as an association is envisioning where we want to be perhaps a decade from now and how we want to be known. Regardless of how we currently perceive ourselves and irrespective of barriers to our organizational goals, who do we want to be? Using strategic planning lingo, what is our “big, hairy audacious goal (BHAG)?” The board’s decision is that PAEA become recognized leaders in medical education, transcending our current position as the leaders in PA education. For years, our creative responses to time and fiscal constraints resulted in innovations in our programs that provided a roadmap to our medical colleagues when they chose to listen. Our medical school colleagues are currently engaging in lively discussions about application-based basic sciences and early clinical experiences, which have been components of PA education for some time. Here at my home institution, the Emory University PA Program, the undergraduate medical education unit is just awakening to the realities of criminal background checks and has asked the PA program to help them create a process by which to undertake these. Instances such as these reinforce our perception of ourselves as innovators in medical education, yet it is a sad fact that we are not often the “go to” folks for our colleagues. The Association seeks to change that by increasing its faculty development efforts, stepping up to various tables as advocates and experts, facilitating a broad research agenda and, most important, broadcasting its achievements.

Which brings me to Michael Whitcomb’s guest editorial in the last issue of the Journal of Physician Assistant Education (JPAE) and the challenge he issued to PAs: Dr. Whitcomb, the editor of Academic Medicine, asked us whether our current model of approximately one year of didactic preparation and one year of clinical experience will be adequate for our graduates to assume greater patient responsibility as necessitated by the anticipated shortage of primary care physicians. His suggestion that the nature of our educational model must be radically altered in order to meet the health care needs of the future is provocative — but timely — as we consider the impact of the “doctor nurse” on our profession. Although we started out 40 years ago with three distinctly different models of education, over time we have gradually become more similar than dissimilar. Our professional education has remained fairly static at approximately seven semesters, regardless of the certificate or degree offered, with the argument often heard that to add more time would decrease the advantage to the student of our truncated process. Frankly, that argument has always given me chills, as I think it is a shallow reason on which to base one’s career choice. Still, while we have made many curricular innovations, they have largely been within the aforementioned parameter of time.

Perhaps the next step in becoming true leaders in medical education is to engage in the kind of discussion that our medical colleagues have not. While they catch up with us in application-based medical training and write articles about their inability to make major changes in their model, we can engage in broader conversations about our goals and our direction as a profession. This dialogue will require a willingness to examine all our assumptions about the nature of our profession and the sacred cows of our educational model. It will require us to engage in meaningful research about who we are and what we do and what we can do better. It will require us to be the leaders that we know we are.