1030 – 1120
Russ Ives, CCPA
Description
The Physician Assistant (PA) profession in Canada is growing exponentially every year with rapid success in numbers continuing to rise however there still remains to be a lack of research to justify this to governments, employers, and potential stakeholders. The success we are currently enjoying needs to be managed properly so that we can ensure PAs become and stay an integral part of the Canadian health care system. The solution seems simple; we need more research on the profession but the question is how do we conduct enough research on a big enough scale to demonstrate the value of PAs? The answer; we implement a mobile app that allows PAs to track/timely document their inpatient clinical encounters. This will allow us to generate reports specific to the services offered, time required and patient populations being seen, all of which will show a wide variety of data. There currently are positive accounts of how employing a PA has proven beneficial however this information is largely anecdotal, based on personal accounts from physician employers and supervisors with limited direct statistical validated information. What we need is to understand the key drivers and activities performed by PAs and to obtain tangible results that can be used to prove a PAs worth.
Inspired by the Typhon Groups Physician Assistant Student Tracker or PAST system utilized by PA students at the University of Manitoba, PAST is designed specifically for PA education programs and allows participants’ to document their clinical experiences and generate activity log reports. The Canadian PA Activity Tracker will do much of the same however will be designed to efficiently collect information in an expedited manner and reflect what PAs are doing across the country. This information will then be used to garner support from governments, employers, as well as potential stakeholders.
Learning Objectives
At the conclusion of this session, the participant will be able to:
- Identify the need for research of the PA profession on a large scale.
- Recognize what could happen if growth of the profession is not properly managed.
- Extrapolate what the results of data collected from the Canadian PA Activity Tracker will mean for the PA profession.
- Discuss features of the Canadian PA Activity Tracker.
- Identify a timeline of when the Canadian PA Activity Tracker will become available.
PRESENTATION
Posted in: Saturday, October 20, 2018