The March 23 issue of Part B News covers the rift between the professionals known, at their urging, as physician associates and other stakeholders within the medical practice field.
As reporter Roy Edroso details in the article, the name change for PAs is not amenable to all parties:
The AAPA adopted the term “physician associate” in place of the traditional “physician assistant” in 2021 after what AAPA characterized as “a methodical process that unfolded over the course of three years and was informed by rigorous and substantial research by independent experts.” The purpose, as expressed by Oregon Society of Physician Associates (OSPA) president Alisa Gifford, was to “give patients a better understanding of the important credentials and responsibilities that PAs have within the healthcare system.”
The AMA reacted negatively, saying the change “will only serve to further confuse patients about who is providing their care” and exacerbate “the existing difficulty many patients experience in identifying who is or is not a physician.”
There's more. Further reporting details some of the headlines that are emerging on this issue:
The New York Times had just run a story headlined “Physician Assistants Are Everywhere. Should You See One?” and sub-headed “They wear white coats and do many things a doctor would do — and their numbers are increasing rapidly” in January.
The meat of the later Times story is the name issue, but reporters Ben Blatt and Teddy Rosenbluth also discuss at length the “expanding role” of PAs in U.S. health care, the “small but growing number” of them who have their own practices, and California’s recent legal change by which PAs’ physician partners are called collaborating rather than supervising physicians, matching the state’s rules for NPs and allowing PAs to practice largely without the immediate presence of the physician.
Other similar stories have appeared in recent months in Medical Economics (“‘Physician associate’ title gains momentum across state legislatures”), HealthLeaders Media (“PAs Want to Be Called Physician Associates. Physicians Are Resisting”) and elsewhere. Some outlets have already embraced the newer usage: U.S. News & World Report recently asked readers of its education section, “Should You Become a Physician Associate or Doctor?”
Nurse practitioners are not eyeing a name change, though some have sought to use the title “doctor” if they hold a doctoral nursing degree. (One such attempt in California resulted last year in a court ruling that they could not.) But they are getting similar attention in the press.
Vox reported on March 12, for example, that “Nurse practitioners are rushing in to fill the gaps in US health care.” The AMA has been attentive to this shift as well, publishing cautionary articles such as “With expanded scope, where do NPs practice? It’s not primary care,” which posits that while state laws that disintermediate physicians from NP care are “often based on the notion that doing so will expand patients’ access to primary care,” a recent survey of autonomous nurse practitioners across Florida “found that 59% of the nurse practitioners they reached were not practicing primary care at all.”
Stay tuned to Part B News to track the latest developments on this topic.