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Happy National Physician Assistant Day

second that! special shout out to my brother who s a former CAF PA who continues to deliver plenty of PA good in the civvy world....
 
second that! special shout out to my brother who s a former CAF PA who continues to deliver plenty of PA good in the civvy world....
Coolness!! There are a few of us here that are delivering care out in the "real" world now...anyone I might know (you can PM if you want instead of public)?
 
You wouldn't have known it was anything day at my work.
 
I don't know if (in my day) the shipboard medics were PAs or some other similar trade but I found them consistently helpful, knowledgeable and dedicated.
 
One of the med techs on scene on 3 Sep 2008 is now a PA out on the West Coast. An accent so thick you could cut it wit a knife byes!!
 
I don't know if (in my day) the shipboard medics were PAs or some other similar trade but I found them consistently helpful, knowledgeable and dedicated.
The 6B medics on ships (and elsewhere) were allowed to be called PA's in the 90's, before it was actually a thing outside of the CAF in Canada.
 
I don't know if (in my day) the shipboard medics were PAs or some other similar trade but I found them consistently helpful, knowledgeable and dedicated.
The 6B medics on ships (and elsewhere) were allowed to be called PA's in the 90's, before it was actually a thing outside of the CAF in Canada.

What a mid-level practitioner could be called (and the prestige it conveyed) was a (sometimes heated) topic of conversation back in the 1980s. It was raised during the Med A Occupational Analysis (OA) that we did in the late 80s. Some were at the time wanting to compare the training and employment of 6Bs to US military PAs.

While I had a larger involvement in the HCA OA that was being done at the same time, I did have occasion to provide a brief report comparing the training of CF Med As with USN Hospital Corpsmen (HMs) including their Independent Duty Corpsmen (IDCs). It came about as we were in the planning/design of the "new" CFMSS. In one of my trips down south, I visited their Naval School of Health Sciences in San Diego and spent time observing the HM "A School" and the IDC courses that they were running at the time. I had an opportunity to chat with the IDC students during coffee breaks and they were bitching about "PAs" even before they had moved on to their version of "phase 2". Their biggest complaint was that they would be going to sea (or to a FMF unit) after training, with limited opportunity for clinical experience, while PAs were employed (at least in the USN at the time) almost exclusively at shore based hospitals and clinics mostly providing care to dependents and retirees. And of course, PAs, as Warrant Officers (as they still were in the late 1980s) were paid more for what these IDCs in training thought was the same skill.
 
What a mid-level practitioner could be called (and the prestige it conveyed) was a (sometimes heated) topic of conversation back in the 1980s. It was raised during the Med A Occupational Analysis (OA) that we did in the late 80s. Some were at the time wanting to compare the training and employment of 6Bs to US military PAs.

While I had a larger involvement in the HCA OA that was being done at the same time, I did have occasion to provide a brief report comparing the training of CF Med As with USN Hospital Corpsmen (HMs) including their Independent Duty Corpsmen (IDCs). It came about as we were in the planning/design of the "new" CFMSS. In one of my trips down south, I visited their Naval School of Health Sciences in San Diego and spent time observing the HM "A School" and the IDC courses that they were running at the time. I had an opportunity to chat with the IDC students during coffee breaks and they were bitching about "PAs" even before they had moved on to their version of "phase 2". Their biggest complaint was that they would be going to sea (or to a FMF unit) after training, with limited opportunity for clinical experience, while PAs were employed (at least in the USN at the time) almost exclusively at shore based hospitals and clinics mostly providing care to dependents and retirees. And of course, PAs, as Warrant Officers (as they still were in the late 1980s) were paid more for what these IDCs in training thought was the same skill.
Worth getting out of bed in the morning - learned a little something new :cool: . Was a bit interesting when I was a MCpl in Haiti in 2004, the USN had a Role 2 facility to back up the USMC task force in Port au Prince - they had both IDC's and a couple PA's with them. When I was a PA with FDU(P), we had a Rouguish Buoy Ex with a USN EOD unit - their attached medical support was an IDC Chief. Was funny, when I was looking after their unit's Cox'n, he kept calling me "Sir", since he was used to his WO's being kinda/sorta officers - he seemed surprised when I told him he actually outranked me, lol.
 
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