The National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants (NCCPA) has released a new report regarding the status of different specialties within the physician assistant (PA) field, including the racial representation among PAs in each specialty.
As of 2024, Black PAs represent just 3.9 percent of all PAs working in primary care settings in the United States, only a 0.1 percent increase since 2020. In comparison, White PAs represent 78.4 percent of those working in primary care.
Of the 25 disciplines included in the report, only three specialities have a PA workforce that is at least 5 percent Black: obstetrics and gynecology (5.5 percent), occupational medicine (5.3 percent), and internal medicine – general practice (5.0 percent). Black PAs are the least represented in plastic surgery (1.5 percent), dermatology (1.6 percent), and orthopaedic surgery (2.0 percent).
Notably, no speciality experienced more than a 0.8 percent increase or decrease in the past four years. Thus, the overall status of working Black PAs has remained virtually unchanged since 2020.
Have you asked why?
I have spoken to a good number of people who feel that the word assistant does not want to be something they feel like they want to carry for the rest of their life. Also, if you have a 3.8 index, you can be one of 14 professions that call you “doctor. Why isn’t the NCCPA pushing our decision that we turn assistant to associate and also that we deserve and earn a doctorate with the credits that we earn in our PA programs? I’m sorry, but sometimes you need to look at the obvious and interview people who’ve become other professions instead of P.As, and see why they decided to become those professions instead of a Physician Associate.
Or- you could call them Para-Doctors, and people would be fooled into thinking that they are smart.