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Yale PA Online


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Yale's online program is on provisional accreditation..I know this is sufficient to take the PANCE. is it also sufficient for CT licensing? CT states: 

Graduated from a physician assistant program accredited, at the time of graduation, by the Accreditation Review Commission on Education for the Physician Assistant (ARC-PA);

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there is currently a resolution pending for the aapa hod that might make this program even less desirable. it states something like "AAPA believes at least 80% of didactic instruction should happen on site at a recognized PA program." while non-binding, it gives folks even more reasons not to hire grads of this program. I already know I won't hire any, but this might influence others as well.  

I would avoid this program like the plague. 

https://www.aapa.org/about/aapa-governance-leadership/aapa-volunteers/hod-b-18-task-force-pa-program-instruction-standards/

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16 minutes ago, PAlife91 said:

Well how would you know they graduated from the online program? 

Also, your post certainly gave me a lot to think about... 

It is on their degree: 

the online program is a physician assistant program

the in-person program is still called physician associate. 

their plan for on-campus physical exam courses, etc is not adequate. we spent 16 weeks on the physical exam course. they have it slotted for ONE week. we spent 1 week on just the neuro exam...

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Guest Coolforcats13

How many hours during those 16 weeks were you in the lab doing the actual physical part of the assessments? And how much of that time were you just sitting there watching your classmates or waiting your turn to participate?  It doesn't really mean anything to say "This program does this many weeks, this program did that many weeks" when the amount of time you spend per week actually participating can vary greatly.

A good example is comparing PA and MD programs. Many people think that because MDs do 4 years, PAs shouldn't have any autonomy because we only 2 years of education. But when you look at our actual schedules, PAs do 6 or 7 semesters, where MDs do 8 semesters. Additionally, PAs spend more time in the classroom than MDs do in the didactic portion. Do you see what I mean? 

Some of the very respectable PA programs in my area have a single physical assessment course that is a 2-hour course over 1 semester.  2 hours per week x 16 weeks equals 32 hours of class time. According to their site, the Yale immersion courses are 40 hours of class work per week (8-5) with 20 hours of open lab during the evenings. So the Yale students would actually get more time in class. Additionally, the immersion courses are limited to 12-15 students, so they are getting more individual attention than many traditional students. 

I don't really have a dog in this fight, but I was a professional educator before I decided to become a PA. Educational experiences can vary greatly whether they are in person or not- you have to look much deeper than that. I do worry that blanket recommendations, like the one the AAPA is considering, will really hurt our profession and our patients. We desperately need more PA schools/ PAs to advance our profession to better meet the needs of our patients. We need to focus on evidence-based practice, not tradition when we make these decisions. If any school can pull off a mostly online PA program, it's Yale. We should at least let them try to succeed before we starting tearing them down. 

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what we don't need is to get painted with the same brush as the NPs : " they do their training online and can't be very good". 

In answer to your question, we did our PE practice in very small groups (mine had 4-6) , so you were always paired off with a partner for practice and never sitting around watching. Attending an in-person program also gives you the advantage of access to other students after hours. practicing a neuro exam on your spouse(like the distance students will do) isn't as helpful as doing it with someone who knows what you are meant to be doing and can correct you. 

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This program also offers weekly clinical experience throughout the didactic year, so you're practicing on real patients with a PA preceptor starting three months into the program until the end of didactic.  I would think this would more than make up for not practicing skills on your fellow classmates.  Those that disapprove of this program or wont hire anyone who graduated from this program likely just dont know as much about it as they should.  There are many beneficial features of this program that you would never get at other more traditional pa schools.

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FWIW many traditional programs also have early clinical exposures. In my program we were in the hospital regularly doing H+Ps and physical exams on admitted patients. Many courses also had required clinical components. In my em didactic course we had to shadow an em pa, for example. 

The issue with only getting to practice while on rotations is that you are limited by what comes in. If you never need to do a complete neuro exam on a pt in clinic then you don't get to practice it. 

I hope you don't think I am singling out the yale program. I am also not a fan of the other 2 distance learning programs out there. 

it should mean something that some of the most vocal opposition to the yale program comes from yale grads. also, the dean of the school of medicine at yale has gone on record as saying the medschool there would never have online didactics "because you can't teach medicine that way". 

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all new grads need hand holding. that is why the future for the profession will likely be mandatory postgrad programs and passage of a specialty exam(and a doctorate, but that is a different issue). look at the progression of medical education for physicians. we are walking the same path:

informal training

formalized training

required basic cert exam

required postgrad training

required specialty exam

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2 hours ago, Coolforcats13 said:

The fact that most of the opposition is coming from Yale students is the most telling thing: the traditional yale students are new grad ivy league kids from good families with outstanding GPAs. they are jealous and indignant that students vastly different from them are getting a Yale education and diploma. I have seen this as an educator, before. 

 

 

what about the fact that the yale med school dean , when asked when the yale medschool would start online didactics basically said over my dead body. you can't teach medicine that way...

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Sorry- Didn't see your post before for some reason - 

by new grads, i meant the students completing their bachelors. research has shown that older students with previous careers generally do better than younger students, even if their GPAs are lower than the younger students. older adults with career experience know themselves and how to get work done. 

like I said above, "over my dead body" and "you can't teach medicine that way" are very emotional statements based on tradition, not evidence. Evidence should always trump tradition. if not, we have failed. 

I really think this all boils down to the older generation being afraid of change. Like it or not, the future is here. The Technology industry has already accepted online learning and working and they are thriving.  progress marches ever forward and all that.

My husband works in tech and he gets beer and dogs at his job. Jealous. 

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57 minutes ago, EMEDPA said:

what about the fact that the yale med school, dean , when asked when the yale medschool would start online didactics basically said over my dead body. you can't teach medicine that way...

When I googled the dean of the Yale school of medicine and his opposition to online I found a testimony from last year written by him, advocating for an increase in the development of online education for providers.  I couldn't find anything of him opposing online, but I would be interested to see it.  It wouldn't make much sense considering Yale PA Online is part of Yale Medical School...

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“They are jealous and indignant that students vastly different from them are getting a Yale education and diploma.

As a recent grad I can tell you this statement couldn’t be further from the truth. Yale is a place of tremendous diversity, and no students in my class or the class after mine that I am aware of opposed the program for this reason. Mostly the opposition was out of concern that the education and experience that the online students would get from the online program would be inferior to what students could get in person because of corners that were being cut and experiences that on campus students got that couldn’t be recreated in the same way in an online platform. (Note that the opposite argument could be made too, that there are certain things that could be created and done online that would be superior to an in person experience). 

“the traditional yale students are mostly new grad ivy league kids from good families with outstanding GPAs.”

This is laughable. We had 3 kids out of 36 that were new grads straight from bachelors and none of them went to ivy schools prior to Yale. We had an equal number who were in their late 30s and early 40s. Multiple students were parents and became parents during school. I guess on average the GPA of Yale students is good, but again there were several students in our class with 3.0-3.3 GPAs who were accepted. 

They are also more diverse and much more likely to be the first person in their family to go to college or get an advanced degree. I can understand why the traditional studentswould feel like that. They think that they earned theirplace at Yale and the online students haven't. 

I’d love to see your evidence for this. 

And as far as that meeting goes with the dean. It was a public forum held because of concern about the online program development. I attended. A medical student asked about if there were plans to develop an online program for the medical students, and the dean alpern said that he didnt think medical school could adequately be taught online and that it would never happen. Then he tried to smoothe things over in an email afterwards stating that while he is not sure if an online version of an MD program would work, an online PA program definitely has the potential to be successful. 

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My evidence that the classes are vastly different comes directly from the program websites themselves, and an AMA from an actual online PA student. for example:

Average GPA:            Traditional: 3.79 (3.29- 4.0)     Online:  no average  (3.35–3.77)  

no one in the 2020 class had 3.0 gpas, the lowest GPA for that class was 3.29.  if you know anything about statistics, you can gather from this evidence that the average GPA for the online students are going to be way lower than 3.79. I would guess somewhere about 3.5. 

The average age of the online cohort is 35. the average PA program age is 26. The traditional yale program doesn't give an average age, but I would be floored if it was 35. you said that you have three students who are 22, and three who are 30's/40's, so the average age would have to be way lower than 35.

The evidence that class is almost exclusively parents is from an online student who gave an AMA. almost all programs have some parents, as your class seems to have, but to have almost all the students be parents is unheard of. This makes the online cohort, in many ways, the most diverse class I have ever heard of. hope you like the evidence you asked for. 

while I admit that my initial thoughts on why the traditional students are opposing the online program doesn't apply to all students, and may be inaccurate,  entitlement is real whether or not you want to admit it, and it is playing a role in this argument. Basic psychology of the out group/in group, and all that goes with it has fueled turf wars on MDs Vs. PAs,  PAs Vs. NPs, and now Online Vs. Traditional. You can be rude on this forum all you want, but neither of you has given actual evidence as to why the online program won't work. Just because the program won't be exactly like your program is not a valid reason to oppose it. If I was a yale student, I would be proud to go to such an innovative school. 

 

 

 

 

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I never said it won't work. I'm sure it will. the issue is this: appearance matters. One of the few things PAs have going for them in the very real turf war vs NPs is that we are trained in the style of a traditional med school program. Docs respect that. they won't respect an online clinical education. we will be painted with the same brush the Nps are today. We are, by any measure, more prepared to practice right out of school than they are: stronger prereqs, better didactics, much longer and better quality rotations (2000-3000 hrs alongside physicians in training in hospitals vs 500-800 hrs, often outpt and often arranged by the student themselves). We have ongoing cme and recert requirements more in line with physician processes. Anything that makes us more like an NP program is a step in the wrong direction. this is why I can not support online education for  primary medical training. want to get your MS or doctorate online, no problem. Interaction with your peers is a very important part of PA/MD/DO school. a lot of learning occurs outside the classroom in informal settings. you can't replicate that with a week on campus or online lectures. you can't replicate that with shadowing a physician every week.

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1 minute ago, EMEDPA said:

I never said it won't work. I'm sure it will. the issue is this: appearance matters. One of the few things PAs have going for them in the very real turf war vs NPs is that we are trained in the style of a traditional med school program. Docs respect that. they won't respect an online clinical education. we will be painted with the same brush the Nps are today. We are, by any measure, more prepared to practice right out of school than they are: stronger prereqs, better didactics, much longer and better quality rotations (2000-3000 hrs alongside physicians in training in hospitals vs 500-800 hrs, often outpt and often arranged by the student themselves). We have ongoing cme and recert requirements more in line with physician processes. Anything that makes us more like an NP program is a step in the wrong direction. this is why I can not support online education for  primary medical training. want to get your MS or doctorate online, no problem. Interaction with your peers is a very important part of PA/MD/DO school. a lot of learning occurs outside the classroom in informal settings. you can't replicate that with a week on campus or online lectures. you can't replicate that with shadowing a physician every week.

Yep. While I believe online education can absolutely work, since a lot of medical students don’t have mandatory classes and only show up on test days, but it’s the perception. As we say in the military, perception is reality.

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yup. same reason stanford had to change their program from 15 months to 2 years. I'm sure their grads were fine, but people thought of stanford grads as folks who took a shortcut and arranged cushy rotation with their friends as preceptors. that was why I did not apply there as a CA resident back in the day.

same reason we went to an MS standard. appearances matter. same reason we are now transitioning to a doctorate. appearances matter.

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its funny- I actually did a little survey around the hospital today, on whether or not my colleagues would hire an online PA grad. More of them said yes than no, but all of the yes answers came from 40 and under set, and all of the no answers came from the older PAs and MDs. 

I'll still wait for actual evidence. I'm more concerned about meeting patient needs than how we compare to NPs. This is pretty sad. 

 

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5 minutes ago, Coolforcats13 said:

its funny- I actually did a little survey around the hospital today, on whether or not my colleagues would hire an online PA grad. More of them said yes than no, but all of the yes answers came from 40 and under set, and all of the no answers came from the older PAs and MDs. 

I'll still wait for actual evidence. I'm more concerned about meeting patient needs than how we compare to NPs. this is pretty sad. 

 

who do you think does the hiring, younger folks or senior PAs/docs? appearances matter .

the reality is that PAs in the trenches are losing jobs to NPs in almost every setting. My local facility only hires NPs. I imagine you are against OTP as well.....

I drive 90 minutes to work for a good job and am probably among the most experienced non-physician providers in my state. I know I am the only em pa in my state to have passed the em caq(which got me my last 2 jobs).

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it's not about that - it is obvious this is a generational thing. it happens every generation. the older one distrusts things they aren't used to, and then once they retire, progress moves forward. this is only a matter of time. 

 

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1 minute ago, Coolforcats13 said:

it's not about that - it is obvious this is a generational thing. it happens every generation. the older one distrusts things they aren't used to, and then once they retire, progress moves forward. this is only a matter of time. 

 

I am guessing I am younger than you , so you will retire first my friend.

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BTW - constantly quoting someone is bad form on the internet. 

also- your signature states you have 31 years experience in emergency medicine. that means when you started that, I was 1 year old. my friend. 

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