Physician's Assistant
A little known career opportunity in the medical profession is the physician’s assistant. A physician is a general practitioner of medicine who has completed at least four undergraduate years of college and four years of med school along with three to eight years of internship and residency. A physician’s assistant is a person who has completed four years of undergraduate college coursework and two to four years in a certification program alongside a physician. The overall appeal of one over the other is that a physician’s assistant can practice medicine on a quicker time table without the expense or hassle of med school.
Physician’s assistants have many of the same responsibilities of the actual physician. They take medical histories, examine and treat patients, order tests, and provide preventative healthcare services. In some cases, they can even write prescriptions, usually under the supervision of the practicing physician for whom he or she works. Physician’s assistants do especially well for themselves in less fortunate or poverty stricken regions. They can run clinics for days if the practicing physician is to busy to make it in to the office. A lot of personal responsibility rests on the hands of the physician’s assistant, and this exciting, in-demand career is lucrative in many ways.
Helping others is the physician’s assistant’s main goal. He or she is usually the first to greet a patient, and acts as the liaison to the physician. He or she will dress minor wounds and burns, and will treat less serious illnesses, working directly with patients and families. They must be caring and hospitable with a good bedside manner. They must be friendly, but also know when to be serious. Many physician’s assistants hold more than one job with more than one clinic.
Being a physician’s assistant helps individuals gain experience in the medical field. It is better for a person to become an assistant first to determine if he or she is on the right career path, and this is true for any field. This way, time and money isn’t wasted becoming a doctor when the passion for practicing medicine isn’t there. And if it is, all the more information to put on a med school application! Nothing looks better on any application or resume than real world, out of the classroom experience.
Employment for the PA is expected to grow faster than the average compared to other occupations. The main reason for this is that PAs are a cost effective way of providing good healthcare. There are physician assistant jobs everywhere, at every socio-economic level. Other than private practices and hospitals, physician assistants can be found in rural clinics, community health centers, freestanding surgical facilities, nursing homes, college-based facilities, industrial settings, and correctional systems. They do make a substantial amount of money, though not as much as a fully qualified doctor. Yet, in this ever-plummeting economy cost efficiency is more important than ever, and sometimes taking a step down can lead to some very rapid steps up in the future