Physician Assistant Educator Competencies.
Abstract
The rapid expansion of physician assistant (PA) programs over the past decade has
led to a shortage of experienced PA faculty. This has prompted many faculty development
initiatives to help provide the skills needed by new faculty making the jump from
clinical practice to academia. Faculty development is a key necessity in health professions
education because many of the professionals attracted to the educator role are primarily
trained as clinicians. Although this issue has been extensively evaluated by our colleagues
in medical, nursing, and health education and various faculty development interventions
have been implemented, this has not been done in the PA profession. In an effort to
correct this, the Physician Assistant Education Association assembled a task force
of experienced PA educators and charged them to evaluate the literature on faculty
competencies in health professions education and to develop a set of PA educator competencies
to help codify the essential knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors that faculty
need to be successful in their academic roles.The task force met its charge by engaging
in an extensive review of the literature, developing a competency framework and proposed
competencies, and soliciting the input of a diverse panel of experts in PA education
to vet the proposed competencies. Using the insights and recommendations from the
expert panel, the task force refined the competencies-resulting in the framework of
PA educator competencies presented in this document.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/18097Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1097/jpa.0000000000000240Publication Info
Zaweski, Joseph; Melcher, Betsy Quick; Sedrak, Mona; Von, Mary; & Fletcher, Sara (2019). Physician Assistant Educator Competencies. The journal of physician assistant education : the official journal of the Physician
Assistant Education Association, 30(1). pp. 47-53. 10.1097/jpa.0000000000000240. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/18097.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Betsy Quick Melcher
Assistant Professor in Family Medicine and Community Health
Betsy Melcher is an assistant professor in the Department of Community and Family
Medicine at Duke University. She serves the PA program as an academic coordinator
and supports the development, administration, and assessment of the preclinical-year curriculum.
She also teaches across a spectrum of topics, including prevention, orthopedics, anatomy,
pediatrics, and emergency medicine. She has led multiple national and international
presentations on interprofe

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