A recent article in The New York Times discusses how ''Primary Care's Image Problem'' is leading the vast majority of med students into specialties over primary care and how the patient-centered medical home model could alter the course of this alarming trend.   A decreasing number of primary care physicians has ...

Editor's Note: Below is a blog post from Paul S. Fogel, DPM, PA-C, on the subject of PA specialty certification. Check back each Monday for a new post, and please feel free to leave comments. If you would like to contribute a blog entry, e-mail assistant editor Heather Simons at hsimons@advanceweb.com. Thanks. After reading editor Michael ...

In a move that gets the ball rolling for health care reform, Montana Sen. Max Baucus has released America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009. While the bill is not yet complete, it contains several provisions in favor of physician assistants: The bill treats physicians, PAs, and NPs very similarly in the new patient models of care, ...

An article that originally appeared in the August issue of Contraception argues that increasing the number of PAs, NPs and certified nurse midwives who perform first-trimester abortions could help improve the declining availability of abortion care. The authors note that this is not just as issue of access, but rather an issue of scope of ...

And so the health care reform debate continues... A recent article at Examiner.com champions PAs and NPs as a possible solution to the physician shortage. ''Primary physician shortage spurs search for alternatives,'' by DC public policy examiner Alan Portner, identifies PAs and NPs as the product of ''shorter, more intensive, ...

Deseret News columnist Marjorie Cortez was spot-on in describing the role of PAs in health care in her article published this morning: I'm continually fascinated by people I encounter in medical-clinic waiting rooms who absolutely refuse to see health-care providers other than doctors. My experiences with physician assistants and nurse ...

On Monday, The Philadelphia Inquirer published a column called ''Waiting to see the Doc: We truly do apologize'' by Rachel K. Sobel, a third-year resident of the Wills Eye Residency Program at Thomas Jefferson University. Sobel writes about the frustration that patients and physicians alike experience when appointments are overbooked. Patients are ...

While it serves nobody for us to post every published ''Health Care 101: Intro to PAs'' article, here's one worth mentioning. This news feature is notable not only because is it an excellent description of the profession, but also because it focuses more on PAs than on NPs, and, remarkably, it was published on Knoxvillebiz.com—yes, the ...

The American Academy of Physician Assistants is teaming with the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners and the Society of Hospital Medicine to offer a CME titled, ''Adult Hospitalist Physician Assistant and Nurse Practitioner Boot Camp.'' This highly specialized and educationally intense ''boot camp'' will immerse hospitalist PAs and NPs in ...

There seems to be a bit of a stink about the new American College of Physicians policy monograph about nurse practitioners in primary care. Overall, the conclusions seem pretty tame. The ACP acknowledges the NP role in primary care, but believes that NPs should work in collaboration with physicians as part of a team. NPs, of course, won't like ...