PA Jeanie Boulet Returns to ER (Warning: Spoiler Alert!)
Physician assistant Jeanie Boulet will return to the ultra-long-running TV series ER for one episode in January.
ADVANCE has the inside scoop on what PA Boulet has been doing during her seven-year hiatus from the show.
1999: Boulet leaves her job as a PA in 1999, concerned that her PA certificate and associate's degree will not be adequate in the future and that the quickly increasing number of PA programs will result in an inevitable PA glut. Boulet enrolls in a bachelor's degree program after returning from the inaugural Association of Family Practice PAs conference in San Antonio.
April 2000: While working on her bachelor's degree, Boulet moves to Mississippi, believing that the state will soon be a hotbed of PA practice because of its critical shortage of health care providers and the newly enacted PA enabling legislation. She's wrong. Seven years later, there are less than 100 PAs in the state, and there is still a critical shortage of health care providers.
June 2002: Boulet obtains her bachelor's degree and immediately feels undereducated for the PA profession. She enrolls in the University of Nebraska's MPAS program.
May 2004: To celebrate the completion of her MPAS, Boulet attends the record-breaking annual PA conference in Las Vegas. She is one of 10,800 PAs at the conference.
June 2005: Stunned by ARC-PA's controversial decision to formally accredit PA postgraduate programs, Boulet immediately begins investigating PA residencies.
June 2007: Feeling somewhat obsolete and lonely as one of the few PAs remaining in primary care, Boulet enters the booming field of aesthetic dermatology. She moonlights part-time in interventional radiology and perigeriatric neurodermasurgical epidemiology. Boulet joins the growing American Society of PAs in Perigeriatric Neurodermasurgical Epidemiology (ASPAPGNDSE) and registers for the ASPAPGNDSE conference in Orlando.
November 2007: Looking for professional recognition, Boulet applies to become a Distinguished Fellow of the AAPA.
January 2008 : Boulet returns to the ER and announces that she is joining the Army in order to enroll in the first-ever PA clinical doctorate degree program.
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