Personal Statement for Admission in Physician Assistant Program

I want to be a physician assistant because I love this profession. I graduated from Wingate University in the year 2005 with a B.S. in Environmental Biology and looking forward to get admission in the physician assistant program.

The use of physician assistants (PAS) as medical housestaff on hospitals' inpatient services is a recent and widespread innovation in the division of medical labor since the late 1970s. PAs have increasingly assumed roles as hospital-based health practitioners, in many instances supplementing or supplanting roles once exclusively held by physician housestaff. There is a variety of reasons for this phenomenon and for the expansion of PAS' roles in the hospital setting.

The PA's original role was assistant to primary-care physicians (AMA 1971). The PA (as well as the nurse practitioner) emerged during a perceived widespread physician shortage. It was hoped that PAS would work mainly with physicians in rural and underserved areas to improve both the quality and the quantity of primary medical care.

A patient having his blood pressure taken by a phy...

English: A physician from the United States Army a...

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To a very large extent, PAS achieved these intended objectives and were quickly incorporated into medical practice. Research performed after the introduction of these practitioners showed that they worked mainly with primary-care physicians, that they were well accepted by patients and other providers, and that they maintained or improved the quality of healthcare delivered in the practices that employed them.

The founders of the PA profession believed that the key to the success of the innovation was for PAs to have a close practice relationship with the physician. Thus, efforts to legally sanction PA practice were aimed not at licensure, but toward modifying existing statutes to allow physicians to delegate a wide variety of medical tasks to PAs. Unlike most allied-health professions, PAs were not introduced to assume new roles brought about by advances in medical technology.