40 Fun Facts About Physician Assistants

Hayley Arceneaux became the first PA in space as medical officer on which privately funded SpaceX mission?

Inspiration4 also made Hayley Arceneaux, a bone cancer survivor who treats young patients at St. Jude, the first person to launch with a prosthesis.

Which former emergency medicine PA became the first member of her profession to serve in the US Congress?

Karen Bass graduated from the PA program at USC's Keck School of Medicine in 1982, entered the House in 2011 and won the mayor's race in 2022.

The PA profession's original name carried which punctuation mark, officially dropped by the AAPA in 1981?

The apostrophe made the original title 'physician's assistant', the form the first program used in 1965, until the AAPA renamed the profession 'physician assistant'.

Which long-running newspaper comic strip introduced readers to PAs when its character Chipper Wallet became one?

Gasoline Alley cartoonist Dick Moores made Chipper Wallet a PA in 1971, when the real profession was only four years past its first graduating class.

The four former military medics chosen for the first PA class in 1965 had all served in which branch?

The Navy had trained all four as hospital corpsmen, giving them considerable medical experience before they ever sat in a PA classroom.

The first PA curriculum was modelled on the fast-track training of doctors during which conflict?

World War II pushed Emory University to a three-year fast-track medical degree, and the doctor who designed it reused the idea for PAs two decades later.

Which future US president, as a state governor, signed the first law authorizing PAs to practice?

Ronald Reagan signed California's Assembly Bill 2109 in September 1970, making the state the first to create PAs as a new category of health professional.

Which actress played Jeanie Boulet, the PA at Chicago's County General Hospital on the television drama ER?

Gloria Reuben played the role from 1995 to 1999, and the PA's HIV diagnosis became one of the character's most notable storylines.

In 2021 the AAPA voted to replace 'assistant' with which word in the profession's official title?

Associate was affirmed by the AAPA House of Delegates in May 2021; backers argued it better reflects a clinician who diagnoses, treats and prescribes.

PAs were chosen in the 1970s to provide medical services to 10,000 workers building which giant project?

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline ran from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, and PAs were picked to care for its workforce when the profession was barely a decade old.

Which North Carolina school graduated the first class of PAs in the United States in 1967?

Duke University enrolled four ex-servicemen in 1965 and graduated three of them two years later, an anniversary PA Week celebrates every year.

Which chairman of medicine, regarded as the founder of the PA profession, assembled the first PA class?

Eugene Stead borrowed the idea from a rural North Carolina doctor, Amos Johnson, who had trained his own assistant to see patients while he was away.

National PA Week marks the anniversary of the first PA graduating class in which month of the year?

October 6 was graduation day in 1967 and, by coincidence, the birthday of the program's founder, so PA Week runs from the 6th to the 12th.

In the credential PA-C, used by PAs who have passed their national board exam, what does the C mean?

Certified status dates from 1975, when the first PAs to pass the national exam received their certificates and began adding the C to their titles.

Which 300-question exam, sat in five one-hour blocks, must new PA graduates pass before they can be licensed?

PANCE is the profession's entry board exam; working PAs later sit the PANRE to renew their credential, and the PACKRAT is a self-assessment test for students.

PA programs in the United States, typically about 27 months long, award which level of degree?

A master's became the standard as applicants arrived already holding bachelor's degrees, and a 2009 summit of PA leaders endorsed it as the profession's terminal degree.

Fittingly for a profession that began with ex-military medics, which federal body is the largest single employer of PAs?

Veterans Affairs has counted more than 2,500 PAs across its health system, continuing a military link that is as old as the profession.

Loretta Ford and Henry Silver launched which sister profession in Colorado in 1965, the year PA training began?

Nurse practitioner training began as a four-month course, and its graduates made up a tenth of the candidates at the first national PA exam in 1973.

Which country's 'barefoot doctors', often cited as forerunners of the PA, served its rural communes from the 1960s?

China folded its barefoot doctors into national policy in 1968 and kept them until the rural communes were broken up in the early 1980s.

In which USA Network series about a concierge doctor in the Hamptons is Divya Katdare the practice's PA?

Royal Pains ran from 2009 to 2016 with Reshma Shetty as Divya Katdare, the character who proposes the concierge practice to Hank Lawson in the first place.

Which state in 2000 became the last of the 50 to authorize PA practice, after 25 years of lobbying?

Mississippi acted three decades after the first state PA law was signed, finally making it legal for PAs to practice in every state.

Which western state in 2024 became the first to adopt the profession's new title in state law?

Oregon acted three years after the AAPA's national vote, so a PA's legal title came to depend on which state issued the license.

Which federal insurance program first recognized PAs as covered providers in every setting in 1997?

Medicare had paid for PA services only in certain places, starting with rural clinics in 1977, until the Balanced Budget Act set one uniform rate.

Which health law named PAs as one of three professions that act as primary providers in the United States?

The Affordable Care Act listed PAs among the nation's primary care providers, and its coverage expansion doubled the projected need for them.

PAs who prescribe controlled substances must register with which federal agency?

The DEA groups PAs with other non-physician prescribers under the label 'mid-level', and each state decides which drug schedules they may prescribe.

Which Russian health worker, introduced to the army under Peter the Great, is counted among the forerunners of the PA?

Feldsher comes from a German word for a field barber-surgeon, and feldshers went on providing primary and maternity care in rural Russia for centuries.

On early American warships, the sailor who assisted the surgeon on board held which title, named after a porridge?

Loblolly boy came from the thick porridge served to sick sailors; the nickname became official in the regulations of 1814, and the job evolved into today's hospital corpsman.

Which 1970 graduate of the original PA program became the first woman to qualify as a PA?

Joyce Nichols was also the first Black woman in the profession, and a senior housing community in Durham, The Joyce, was later named for her.

Most applicants to US PA schools apply through which centralized online service, launched in 2001?

CASPA lets a candidate send a single application to any number of participating PA programs, much as AMCAS does for medical schools.

After the classroom phase, PA students must complete more than 2,000 hours of which kind of training?

Clinical rotations take students through family medicine, internal medicine, general surgery, emergency medicine and psychiatry, a plan modeled on medical school.

Richard Smith's MEDEX program, which sent ex-military medics into rural Northwest practices, began at which school?

The University of Washington started MEDEX in 1969; its founder had earlier been picked by President Lyndon Johnson to lead the desegregation of US hospitals.

Which Bronx hospital opened the first postgraduate residency for PAs, a surgical program, in 1971?

Montefiore Medical Center had trained more than 375 surgical PAs by the program's 40th anniversary, though PAs, unlike doctors, are not required to do a residency.

Which body, which also licenses Britain's doctors, became the regulator of UK PAs in December 2024?

The General Medical Council took over from a voluntary register kept by the profession's own faculty, which closed that same month.

Which country on Africa's Atlantic coast set up a PA program in 1965, the same year as the first American class?

Liberia built its program with the World Health Organization and UNICEF, and fourteen Liberian PAs later died treating patients during the Ebola epidemic.

In Kenya and Malawi, the health worker whose role most resembles that of a PA holds which job title?

Clinical officer duties in Malawi extend to routine surgical and obstetric operations, including emergency orthopaedics and Caesarean sections.

Which traditional medical symbol is woven in abstract form through the AAPA logo adopted in 2022?

Caduceus imagery, a staff entwined by two snakes, threads through the lettering, with angled ends meant to suggest forward motion.

The first four-year bachelor's degree program for PAs was approved in 1968 at Alderson-Broaddus College in which state?

West Virginia got the program because Dr. Hu Myers asked the college's trustees twice; they had turned down his first proposal years earlier.

Henry Silver's late-1960s PA program at the University of Colorado trained its graduates for which branch of medicine?

Pediatrics was the whole focus of the course, whose graduates carried a title built around child health instead of the words 'physician assistant'.

Which body, better known for testing future doctors, gave PAs their first standardized entry exam in 1973?

The National Board of Medical Examiners tested 880 candidates, and a year later the PA exam became the first medical board exam to score physical exams by checklist.

The US military trains its PAs through an interservice program at Fort Sam Houston in which Texas city?

San Antonio became the single training base in 1996, when federal cutbacks pushed the services to merge their separate PA schools into one.