PHYSICIAN ASSISTANT

Physician Assistant



Physician Assistant

Introduction

Physician assistants (PAs) are healthcare professionals who are educated according to the medical model and licensed to practice medicine under the supervision of a physician. The profession developed in response to a growing population and an increased demand for medical care. The first PAs were graduates of Duke University's pioneering program. By design, these first graduates were male, with a single exception, and many were former military medics with experience in the Vietnam War. Conflicts between the American Medical Association and the American Nursing Association (ANA) helped to limit the number of women becoming PAs in the early years, but by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, women made up nearly 60 percent of practicing PAs.

Ethical and legal issues

Physician assistants are faced ethical and legal challenges as a result of increased medical technology, dynamic modes of communication and increased responsibilities for physician assistants. Most of these legal and ethical challenges are linked directly to legislative changes with regard to confidentiality matters and ethics pertaining to medical technologies. Confidentiality is an issue that has been practiced by the physician assistants for many years, but legal changes have increased the need for confidentiality to be maintained. In 1996, the introduction of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) increased the need for protecting distribution of confidential patient information (Lachman, 2006). Several requirements of reducing the spread and login systems were implemented so that access to confidential information could be tracked. Tracking of data and usage of password systems ensured that employees could not access files of patients they were caring for.

Moffitt Cancer Centre is at the middle of controversy after it was revealed that patient consent for research study was falsified. The center is investigating if hundreds of signatures on documents were fraudulent, which enrolled patients to one of the largest cancer research study performed by the hospital (Martin, 2010). When either a physician or a healthcare provider seeks to carry out a procedure on a patient, it is the duty of a physician to acquire an informed consent signature. This implies that the patient knows the procedure and available alternatives, has clarified with the provider about the procedure, knows the risks involved and the benefits, and is at liberty to either sign or refuse to partake in the activity. When the physician fails to obtain and instead falsifies the signature, both the provider and the physician can be held accountable for any damages incurred.

The president and CEO of Moffitt Cancer Centre, Dr. William Dalton, agreed that an employee had falsified a patient's signature on a consent document and the committee wasinvestigating 492 questionable signatures. The study, known as Total Cancer Care, is an observation trial which tracks cancer patients over a period of time but not the form of treatment they are given. Since confidentiality and proper consent from patients are crucial to the research process, the discovery led to complete audit of all employees' work on July 29 (Martin, ...