A New Well
After 30 years of training physician assistants (PA) in primary care for rural and underserved areas, the UND PA program began noticing fewer and fewer North Dakotans in the program. New
national standards have allowed the program to refocus slightly to educate more North Dakotans and produce PAs that are used to working as a member of a health care team.
Strong tradition
Since its inception in 1970, the PA program at UND has served as a way for nurses to play a larger roll in rural and underserved health care areas.
Admitting only registered nurses with strong clinical experience (10 years or more) allowed the program to avoid re-teaching basic medical courses and incoming students already knew the
basics of clinical care. This made the program very efficient by needing fewer faculty and taking less time to complete.
However, in the early 2000s, a national trend began to move PA studies from the certificate level of education to a graduate program and the accrediting body revised its standards, requiring
the program to teach some of the basic sciences that previously were only prerequisites, changing the UND program from 12 months to 20 months.
Meanwhile, due to the shortage of nurses in North Dakota as well as throughout the United States, and because there were continuing requests from health care professionals other than nurses to seek entrance into the program, the faculty took a long, hard look at the feasibility of accepting other health care professionals.
Filling a need
“Everybody’s got a different background. We all have our strong points and our weak points, but we all help each other out.”
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“We realized that with our program as it is now, very few changes were needed to be able to expand the program to include other experienced health care professionals, ” explained Mary Ann Laxen, FNP/PA ’91, director of the PA program at UND.
Last August, the first class of students in a pilot program began their education. A little more than half of the class members are
registered nurses, the rest come from a variety of other health care fields, all have extensive clinical experience and the majority of these students come from North Dakota or Minnesota.
“I never thought I could go to UND, because they only took nurses,” said Dacia Engberg, a respiratory therapist from Fargo. “But I was always checking back and just when I was applying
elsewhere, which would mean I would have to move, they opened up the program.”
Although all students must have at least a bachelor’s degree, some of the pilot students needed additional training in certain technical skills. The program has added extra classes and
labs and collaborated with the UND College of Nursing to ensure all students can adequately perform certain basic clinical procedures.
“Our preparation and planning has really paid off,” said Laxen. “We looked at every course to see what adjustments might need to be made and we are doing a study as we go, comparing the two
groups and identifying areas of the curriculum that might still need to be strengthened.”
Teamwork
The students in this class who are not nurses are a variety of health care professionals including physical therapists, respiratory therapists, pharmacists, paramedics, corpsmen, foreign medical graduates, lab and radiology technologists, cardiovascular technicians and clinical lab scientists. Other eligible professionals include psychologists, exercise physiologists, athletic trainers and occupational therapists.
Having students from a variety of backgrounds
has already increased the richness of the program, said Laxen.
“Classmates are able to help each other depending on their backgrounds,” she said. “Pharmacists can help study pharmacology, ER nurses help study trauma protocol, while radiology techs can explain those diagnostic procedures.”
Engberg agrees.
“Everybody’s got a different background,” she said. “We all have our strong points and our weak points, but we all help each other out.”
“This team approach in education mirrors what is needed in all facets of health care in the ‘real world,’” said Laxen. “They are coming to realize the strengths of each of these health care
professions. They are a living example of the strengths of health care professionals working as a team and hopefully that will carry over into their professional life.”
More changes ahead
Though things are going well with a new student body, the PA program is not resting on its laurels. With the next class, it is going to expand to a 24-month program, with the first two
semesters completely on-line, allowing these professionals to continue working part-time during the first two semesters. This also allows sufficient time to bring everyone “up to speed”
before beginning the clinical portion of the program.
In addition, rather than have one class of 35 students a year, they are going to start taking a class of 70 once every two years, allowing students to work with even more and diverse classmates and allowing faculty to focus on just one class at a time.
In these changes, the program only sees advantage.
“It adds breadth to the program,” said Laxen. “It opens the possibility of studying to become a PA at UND to more people in North Dakota and surrounding states, but still maintains our
unique niche in the field of PA education.”
- Amanda Scurry
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