Hey, what's up guys my name is John and I'm an emergency medicine
Medical Care Practitioner
If you haven't been keeping up with current events, over the last
two years the AAPA has been investigating a title change for our profession.
In this video I'm going to talk about the title change process, kind of what the AAPA has been
doing over the Past two years, and my thoughts on the whole thing because I don't really like this.
And guys before I get started if you could please just take a millisecond
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It does take a lot of time and research to make these videos so I hope that you guys enjoy it.
Let's get started.
Now everything in this video is subject to change,
we are literally in the midst of a name change. Anything that
I say today could possibly be different a month, two months, five months from now.
So the issue, ultimately, is that the AAPA says that there is a disconnect between
our professional title and what PAs do in health care.
They said that when they offered the definition of what a Physician Assistant is,
three fourths of patients, physicians, and administrators got that definition wrong.
The AAPA in 2018 started an investigation into a possible name change.
They partnered with this large British firm, WPP.
Ultimately they took 150 different titles and reduced them down to four titles.
Physician Associate
Medical Care Practitioner
Practition or prac... praxion? I have no idea how to pronounce this.
And clinist or clinicist or something, right? It's
stupid they kind of greyed that one out so they don't even care about that one.
WPP is recommending that we change our name to
Medical Care Practitioners. That's their recommendation.
So this recommendation is now going to go back to the AAPA
where they will decide whether or not they want to act upon this change or not.
Ultimately, they figured out that a name change for a profession
will cost tens of millions of dollars, take months to years to implement.
Now this is only a name change there's no sort of change in our role.
Discussion wise what do iI hink about a name
change for our profession? I personally don't like it.
Now, I know that some people will say, “well the name change isn't for you,
John. You're a Physician Assistant. You already know your role in the healthcare marketplace.
The name change is for the patients, the physicians, your coworkers,
and administrators who have no idea – still after 50 years – what Physician Assistants are.”
I have no issue calling myself a Physician Assistant and personally it
accurately reflects what I do in the emergency department, where I am there with a physician
and my job is to help that physician see patients quickly, effectively, safely.
I understand that the term Physician Assistant wouldn't necessarily reflect well upon somebody
who is essentially working out in rural America or in some solo practice or urgent care
and they literally do not interact with a supervising physician or they only have
a supervising physician available by phone and are pretty much practicing autonomously.
I understand that. I understand that.
I understand that the term Physician Assistant might make us be confused with medical assistant.
I also understand that people want to disassociate the name with physicians,
right? They don't want us to claim that we are something that we are not.
We are not physicians. We are not doctors.
It also solves the possessive apostrophe problem.
Medical Care Practitioner just sounds really clunky, we've spent 50 years
already educating patients on what a PA is and now I feel like it's starting to gain
some traction. People are starting to understand what a Physician Assistant is and does and now
we are going to reset the clock in terms of that timing and have to start from square one again.
I'm 90 percent in the camp of we should just keep our name the same
and then 10 percent in the camp of if we're going to change our name
we should change it to Physician Associate because in the United Kingdom
they call their PAs “Physician Associates.” Yale calls their PAs “Physician Associates.”
So the term is already kind of out there.
Primarily it would be because we get to keep our acronym, which is P–A.
We kind of avoid that huge jump, right?
But, people don't like that term. Physicians don't like that term.
I'm not really a fan of...
I'm not like, ultimately a huge fan of that term, but if we were to change and I saw
that that was one of the options that they were considering I would prefer to change to that.
Now WPP says that changing from Physician Assistant to Physician Associate is not a
significant enough jump to justify all of the money and years spent making the change.
It's a... it's a conundrum.
There is no right or wrong answer. Personally, I think we should
not focus all this time, effort and money into changing a professional name but I understand
why some of my PA colleagues would like a name change and so I'm going to end the video here.
In the comments below tell me what you think about this name change tell me if you want a
name change. Tell me why you want a name change ; tell me why you don't want a name change.
There's no right or wrong answer. Personally people want this some people don't want this so...
what's up? What do you think?
And I hope all you PA students out there are excited for MCP school.
If you like content like this, anything MCP related
please, please subscribe to my channel. Feel free to chat with me on Instagram. And guys,
stay safe out there. Have a great rest of your day.
Bye.