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I'm impressed you have a wife of almost 50 years. No mean feat these days.

I work in a relatively large hospital system in a major city in the northeast, where there are several hundred PAs currently working. We are highly utilized across all specialities and generally treated well with competitive salaries, good benefits, significant respect, etc. This morning we received notice by our CEO (who is a former PA) that the salary of all PAs will be going up, effective next pay period. Our hospital uses a pay grade scale, so PAs are now going to be in the same pay grade as the pharmacists and CRNAs. The reasoning for this, as stated in the email, was to compensate for the "progression of the PA profession, OTP influences, and continued expansion of the modern medical approach." Has anyone else had any changes in their hospitals or increases in salary due to OTP? The fact that our CEO is a PA might have had something to do with the push, but it is good to see that hospitals are starting to recognize the progression in our profession. Regardless, I'll enjoy my 17k increase either way...

I wanted to make a very brief and to-the-point case for a new title: Medical Practitioner. As a profession what we need more than ever is our own path. * How do we separate ourselves from NPs? Well, the biggest thing is that we practice medicine within the medical model. * How do we separate ourselves from Physicians? Well, we aren't physicians and did not train as one, but we still practice medicine. My point is that Medical Practitioner not only describes what we do perfectly, but it gives us our own path. We can say we are a practitioner just like NPs, but we practice in the medical model. We can say that we practice medicine similar to Physicians, but our training was more accelerated and we did not attend a full residency, and therefore we are practitioners.

A buddy of mine was recently pulled over for "80 in a 55". he went to court and told the judge "my car won't go 80". the judge took his keys, was gone for 20 min , came back and said " you are right. case dismissed".

Well, the HOD just voted yesterday to fund a research group/initiative to research the title change. The cost is estimated to be >1 million to do this. This just goes to show you how serious PAs are about title change. The time for change has come, and we are now banding together to fight this battle. Overall, I agree. We are not physicians. We are not trained to the same level as physicians and we should not practice completely independently for physicians, especially right out of school. With tha that being said, NPs have plowed over the politicians and achieved the unthinkable. Should NPs be able to practice completely independently from a physician? NO!!! But they have, and they will continue until the capture the whole US, and it which point they will essentially be equal to MD, and PAs will basically vanish in this time. (doomsday yes, but it's a legitimate reality). My point is that I don't think PAs want complete independent practice like NPs, but we want parity and we want to be competitive against NPs because we see our futures collapsing before our eyes. It is because of this that we are fighting for similar regulations and laws as NPs. (in my opinion) Our current title = subservience, NOT collaboration. Medical Practitioner = collaboration, and team work. Also, our current tittle requires any legislator, layman, and patient to really challenge their brain in accepting that they are letting an assistant treat them. That they are allowing an assistant to prescribe medication. That they are supporting an assistant to have their own assistant boards to regulate and discipline other assistants. The list goes on and on, and having assistant in our title is very hurtful for any legislative desires that we have.

There's a chilling silencing of free speech going on in this country. Granted you don't necessarily have a right to free speech where your employer is concerned, but this is getting Orwellian.

You must drive a nice car cause my 12+ year old vehicle with 210K miles won't go passed 75 mph without shaking. That is how I know I am speeding.

Indeed. It is all give and take. I like a quieter country life and once or twice a month my wife and I would spend the weekend in Dallas or Ft Worth or San Antonio or Austin or Shreveport etc etc using the money I wasn't spending on other things. Folks who like the city life and all the amenities and options it offers would hate it. I don't like crowds, traffic, and sometimes, people very much. I like my privacy...a lot. We each have to balance the scales and figure out what is our personally most important issues. No place I have ever been rang all the bells of a perfect place to live...and yet I have enjoyed them all.

The thing I keep saying is that we wouldn't address ourselves as "MPs." We would address our selves as Medical Practitioners. As PAs we are so used to just saying the acronym due to our embarrassment over our full title, that we forget that we can actually call ourselves by our actual title. Besides, I think <3% served in the military, and MP is ONLY a military thing so it really shouldn't be much of a factor. Practitioner Advanced doesn't even make any sense in the English language. I really don't understand the push for keeping the initials. Honestly, we want people to notice this change, it needs to be a big deal, and keeping the initials is flying under the radar. Moving to Medical Practitioner would not go unnoticed, and would entice major conversation, discussion, and debate, which is where we prove that we are absolutely qualified to practice medicine, and to show our advantages over our NP counterparts.

Last night, my wife and I drove through at a local pharmacy here in Columbus (the 14th largest city in the US) to pick up a prescription. The pharmacist (not his assistant, who was getting my script) came to the window. I'd never met him before. He addressed me as "doctor," noting that I had a white coat hanging up in my back seat and he had looked me up in the database. Noting that I work in cardiology, he asked me about the merits of a brand-name beta blocker (Bystolic). I gave him some information about the drug and his curiosity was satisfied. He kept calling me "doctor" (strange since he'd obviously just looked me up). I corrected him, noting that I am a PA. "I'm going to call you 'doctor' anyway" was his cheerful answer. My wife of almost 50 years was impressed.

I ride a motorcycle every day I can. I occasionally go 100 or better. I try to calculate how long a smear I'll make if I go down. I had a bad accident about 6 years ago going 15 MPH. A guy came blasting out of a blind drive backwards without slowing down and broadsided me. Lots of injuries ,expenses, pain etc Usual story...uninsured, not his car suspended drivers license. My wife didn't want me to ride again but its been a hobby and passion since I was a kid. I made her a deal...I bought tons of life insurance and promised the next accident would be fatal. Marriage..... it's all about compromise.

no cme/vacation/pto and new grad wages? hard pass.

Fuck surveys. Yeah. I said it.

Slowly and carefully! Most importantly, we have a modest lifestyle. We live in the midwest, own our $100K home, and have no other debt (other than a mortgage on a large piece of land we just bought that we will soon build our dream house on). As to real estate (and I just answered this on a PM), a few pieces of advice. 1: Don't be a broke landlord. Broke landlords are the guys who HAVE to get a tenant in asap because they have to cover the mortgage. Since they HAVE to get tenants in, they get crappy tenants who break your stuff and cost you a lot of time and money. My purchasing strategy is to find distressed houses in very good neighborhoods, buy them for dirt cheap, renovate them, then hold onto them. My rental strategy is to get GOOD tenants, and I refuse to rent to people who I think may not be good tenants. I screen, a LOT. I probably get 3 completed applications, with people who are ready to pay first/last/security deposit, before I agree to rent. I would rather let my houses sit empty for months before renting to the wrong person (I've lost $40K on a house before....TWICE!!). Another way I do this is by charging a little more than market value. People who call are those looking for that higher rental-rate house, so can usually afford it. I also advertise that I am looking for LONG TERM tenants, but start with a six month lease. At the end of six months I know whether they take care of the house, whether they pay rent on time (notice my priorities there), and whether they are a PITA. And they know by then than I'm not a slumlord. If I want to keep them, then I drop the rent in exchange for a year lease. If I want them to move out, then I jack the rent up after the six-months are up. I can do this because I'm not a broke landlord (see above definition). 2. Location, location, location. Oh, and location. You want a good/very-good neighborhood. Some neighborhoods only have crappy rentals, so will only have crappy tenants. Avoid them...they are not worth it. Yeah, the SJWs may cry racism/bigotry/oppression, but it's just business. 3. Take your TIME! You HAVE to buy right, which means you HAVE to have money in hand. This applies to many things beyond investment real estate. We recently bought a large piece of land that we will eventually build our dream home on...after looking for more than 3 years! Over those three years we have probably looked at 20 pieces of real estate/land to build on, and we only put in one other offer which fell through because we they wanted too much, and we were willing to walk away. When we found the land we finally purchased we both immediately knew it would work very very well for us, and the price was wayyyyy under what it was worth. And we had >50% of the cost in cash (will pay rest off in very short time). The same thing with investment real estate. Take your TIME! We probably looked at 20-30 houses before we bought each of our investment properties. We are knowledgeable about RE values in the neighborhoods we are looking in. The properties we do buy we manage to get at well under market value, but only because we are (almost) always looking, and we are willing to walk away. 4. Did I mention location? Yeah, it's important. The only thing more important than location is not having a mortgage. I hope this helps.

Update from the neuro ICU. I've been racking up procedures, and learning a lot. Today was my second LP, and I've done several central and arterial lines, as well as a thoracentesis. By the end of MICU, I was taking 4-5 patients, and pretty much running them (though often running my ideas behind the other providers). Neuro is totally different. The culture in this unit is such that the fellows are *extremely* hands on, which can be a bit frustrating. However, there's so much value to my time there. Even though I don't imagine myself in a neuro ICU, I think having a comfort with neuro patients will take me a long way, as many people who never worked in neuro have commented that they are the one type of patient they feel least prepared to take care of (likewise, I've heard neuro APPs say that they don't feel as comfortable with a septic patient, or one with some kind of abdominal pathology--that's the point of residency, to make you versatile). Still very glad to be here, still very glad I'm in a residency, still very glad I chose critical care.

Collaboration is at the heart of OTP. It changes us from dependent to team member. Great changes are afoot. Soon self regulation with PA majority boards. Direct pay from Medicare instead of billing through the physician. Title change. It is an exciting time.

it's more a PR thing. now the official state regs don't list PAs as requiring "supervision", but working in collaboration with physicians. words matter. this is a good change. in my state certified PAs are sponsored, not supervised.

And it just passed

Hopefully, only 2 more days before we get some good news! Anxiously waiting

"We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! And *I* will make them pay for what they've done!" yeah, nope. Not my job to care about their job; I'm not the job police. I give them a reasonable (to me) amount of time. I figure most times, the day of is fairly reasonable. Vaya con dios, on to the next.

Keep practicing for interviews they will come keep accumulating a bunch of healthcare hours because you will need to draw on your patient experiences if you don’t keep yourself sane and busy and become better the next day or else you end up like me and having to apply for a third time that should be motivation to keep practicing and being better not having to apply because trying again cost lotta money $$$

Pm your PS, I'll read and give you feedback for a low price of $0.

I have had 2 positions where this was common. I worked for a community health center who hired new grads because they were cheap. When they had been there for a while, earned their keep and improved their skills they would request a raise and were told "we are a CHC and we don't do that." Hard job, no raise ever...buh bye. My current employer just keeps cutting staff and asking people to work harder. We have lost 1/2 of our best MAs and LVNs because there is simply better money for less work elsewhere. We have lost 1/3 of our UC APPs for the same reason. The decisions are made by people sitting in an office looking at diagrams and flow charts who have no idea what we actually do. Until they feel some kind of bite nothing will change. When people waited 90 minutes for routine problems because we had 1 MA and 1 provider where we usually had 2 I gave them the email and phone number to admin. When I was told to stop I advised that if they thought I was going to get bitched at all day for their decisions while they hid in their offices they were nuts. I'm a marked man...

Your previous degree is non-medical (as was mine). If you have minimal experience AND minimal prereqs, I don’t see an easy path for you getting admitted unless there is a bunch you’ve not told us. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I appreciate your service to our veterans. Being a Vietnam Veteran myself I appreciate PAs and there care. They should not be Associates or Assistants but Mefical Practioners because that’s what they do.