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Pa's in administrative roles


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Hello folks. I wanted to know if it's relatively common for pa's to work as hospital administrators. My plan is to get an mph or MBA after pa school and transition to admin when I'm older/burnt out from clinical work. Thanks for your time

 

It's actually pretty uncommon, but not impossible. The problem is, it takes more than the degree. When you are older, you will have clinical experience, and a pretty good income. Even with your MPH, MHA, MBA, etc, you won't have any real "admin" experience, so you will be starting over, and basically be a lower level manager, supervisor, etc. Then you can start to move up the admin ladder, but you will likely be staring at a decent cut in pay at first.

 

It's pretty hard to be a PA with significant clinical experience, and be able to simply transition into a senior admin role. I've never heard of that.

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James Scheulen is a PA MBA and he is the Chief Administrative Officer of Hopkins Emergency Medicine along with serving in several other Director roles there. Probably not the norm, but if it can happen at Hopkins, it can happen anywhere!

 

Yeah, but that's the point. James, IIRC, left clinical practice back in the late 1980's and was some kind of marketing consultant for a biotech firm, then he was a director, then a lower level administrator, and then moved on to other positions. I talked with about it once long ago, and that's what I remember...there may have been more to the story as well.

 

You can certainly move into administrative roles, but to become a full hospital administrator takes a lot of business experience. For example, here, once you have your MBA/MHA/MPH, you can apply to be an Operations Manager, which is really a junior administrator. After years of service in that role, you can be selected to move up to Operations Administrator (hospital administrator), subsequently you then can move up to Associate Administrator, on up the chain...

 

Or you can do a fellowship...we have one here:

 

http://www.mayoclinic.org/afp/

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It's actually pretty uncommon, but not impossible. The problem is, it takes more than the degree. When you are older, you will have clinical experience, and a pretty good income. Even with your MPH, MHA, MBA, etc, you won't have any real "admin" experience, so you will be starting over, and basically be a lower level manager, supervisor, etc. Then you can start to move up the admin ladder, but you will likely be staring at a decent cut in pay at first.

 

It's pretty hard to be a PA with significant clinical experience, and be able to simply transition into a senior admin role. I've never heard of that.

 

Although I'm not a PA I can confirm the above. I had 3 yrs of RT experience prior to my MPH program and the positions that pay at or above my previous income are numbered. Management consulting pays very well, but the hours are horrible so I ruled out that path.

 

However, you can leverage your clinical/frontline experience. Many administrators in healthcare do not understand the realities of care delivery nor are they empathic to the issues. This will be a huge upper hand as an administrator when relating to staff.

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