 Welcome back to channel everybody. For those of you who are new around here, my name is Michael aka Dr. Chalini and I'm an interventional radiologist in New York City. Two of my left is my lovely wife, Andriana, who has been a practicing PA for eight years. And by now you've seen the title of this video. So tell them what it's about. So we're going to be discussing the recent title change of PA from physician assistant to physician associate and our thoughts on this title change. We got a lot of requests for this video. So you left us no choice. Let's do it. All right. As many of you already heard, we're just going straight into it. Did I, was that it? That was the intro? Yeah. All right. That's our intro. All right. Okay. All right. So first and foremost, there are a lot of people still out there that don't know what a physician assistant or a PA actually is. So we'll read the definition from the AAPA.org website. So PAs are medical professionals who diagnose illness, develop and manage treatment plans, prescribe medications, and often serve as a patient's principal health care provider. They practice in every state and every medical setting and specialty, improving health care access and quality. Now that we know what a PA is, let's talk about the name change. So on May 24th, the AAPA House of Delegates passed by majority votes a historic resolution affirming the name change from physician assistant to physician associate. And we're here to kind of give our thoughts as to what it means to me as a PA and for Michael to give his opinion as a physician, what that means in their field or in their scope of practice. I have my own feelings about it, but I want to hear your feelings about it. She's been a practicing PA for eight years and a number of different specialties. So physician assistant, physician associate, how exactly do you feel? So I'll begin by when I first started practicing as a PA. This was maybe in the first couple of months. I was out and someone had asked what I did for work and I'm like, oh, I'm a PA and they're like, oh, a personal assistant for who? No, actually I'm a physician assistant and they're like, oh, like an administrative assistant. They kind of interpret that as I was like an administrative assistant in my medical office or in a medical practice. People say that a lot because they hear the word assistant and they immediately think you're like in an office setting. Right, exactly. There has actually been always talks about a different name for our profession since I was in PA school. Yale's PA program is actually a physician associate program. So you can go look it up or we'll kind of put it on, put a little screen right here that their program up here, that their program is actually a physician associate program. Yeah. So it's actually not a new title, but it's not the official title. That being said, we are still not going by the name physician associate. We're still physician assistant. There's a lot of campaigns and branding that needs to be done with this change. So for now, I am Adriana physician assistant. So what do you think about the title change? As I mentioned recently in the Q&A, I think it's a great way for us as PA's to not confuse the public when it comes to assistant versus associate. So when you introduce yourself as a PA to a patient, it's a little bit easier for the patient to understand that we are the provider and not the assistant in the office and we will be seeing them and treating them and diagnosing them or whatever we may be doing. PA's or myself are not here to replace a physician. Our title and our scope of practice isn't changing. We still have to practice under a physician. I think for us, it's just easier and a better way for us to introduce ourselves to the public and to kind of have a better grasp on what our profession really is. We're not just an assistant. You know, we're a provider to some patients. During the pandemic, it was shown that we needed PA's in urgent care, is in the ER's in the ICU's. We needed more providers and that's more help. I'll give my thoughts on it. I think generally it's a better way to kind of classify PA's because I think the term assistant is a little kind of a misnomer. It can kind of be misconstrued. It's a little confusing, but at the same time, the word associate can also be a little confusing, right? So technically I'm a physician. I'm joining a private practice with other physician colleagues and we have associate physicians and we have partners. So any physician in that practice before they become a partner after a certain number of years is considered an associate. Got it. So technically I would be an associate physician at my practice. Now, without being said, I would never tell people outside of my practice that I'm an associate. I think that's where it comes into play. It's like when you introduce yourself to your patient, you're not saying hi, I'm physician associate Michael Trillini, right? Exactly. It's always hi. I'm Dr. Trillini. You're always the physician. So I feel the term physician associate can also be confusing as well for patients because if you introduce yourself as a physician associate, they may second guess and be like, is he or she an associate physician like to the practice? Yeah, I don't know. It's just, it's just confusing. Like are they actually an associate physician? Are they a physician assistant who now had the name changed to physician associate? So I can see how it's confusing. So it's like on one hand I like the change because it takes out the word assistant and it gives them a better title physician associate, which sounds like a colleague to the physician, which they are, but also I can see that it could potentially cause confusion in the future as well. Which is why we haven't even implemented this change because that's where the APA stated that there's lots of campaigns and branding that has to be done to educate the public and I guess everyone essentially of what the physician associate title means. One of the big confusion is physician assistants, they don't want to be doctors. Like do you want to be a doctor? No. That's what I say. They're like, oh, they're always PAs want to be doctors and they just want to have a name that's a doctor related or whatnot. But you don't want to be a doctor. That's why we chose this path for a reason. And a lot of people always comment below, like if we do a PA related video, they're like, oh, she just wanted to be a doctor. I'm like, no, she went this because she didn't want to be a doctor. So I wanted to touch a little bit on the article that the AOA American House Pathetic Association put out about the physician assistant's name change. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I'll probably put a link down below this video. But basically what they're saying is, regardless of the name change, there is no replacing a physician's training in a physician led team. They always want a physician to be leading the team and leading the charge on patient care. And I 100% agree with this, but I don't think that changing the name from physician assistant to physician associate would mean that they are trying to take over as a lead role for a patient care team. I think they're just kind of like making sure and making sure that everybody knows. But they kind of also incorporated with that just all non-physician providers. So I don't know what that has anything to do with the name change. Like there are a lot of doctorates, right? There's like a doctor and nurse practitioner, a doctor of physical therapy, a doctor of pharmacy. There's a lot of doctor titles that aren't physicians. And they're saying basically the more we start doing this alphabet soup, word jumble, physician-esque name titles, it can cause even more confusion for the general population. Which, you know, I get it, I get it. 100%. They aren't trying to replace us. Well, there may be some select few that are, but I've never encountered one, but I'm sure they're, yeah, of course. You always hear stories, right? So I feel like this is a good segue now into something else I want to talk about because I get a lot of comments on this as well, saying like, I'm just a Dr. Shill who, you know, because I'm a PA on his wife, or whatever, like anybody who hates on the physician assistant physician associate doesn't understand how important they actually are to physicians. Like they, they, they either haven't worked with them, have some sort of eutistical complex where they feel like they're inferior to them or something, or they're a med student or resident who has had that experience with one or doesn't work with them, or it's a physician that doesn't know how to utilize them appropriately. So I'll give you an example of practice I'm going to. There's a couple of PAs that weren't there. And one of them was going to move out of the state to the other side of the country. Our practice didn't want them to leave so bad that they basically made them an offer. They can't refuse because that's how good they were. That's how much you needed them and that's how much and how valuable they are to the practice because you don't realize using their physician assistant appropriately allows you as the physician to free up your time to do other things. Having a PA available to other procedures that are less complex and freeze me up to do more complex procedures, not only is better for the practice being able to do more patients, but it's better for the patients as well because they get quicker access to care. It's a win-win and a lot of the PAs, especially in interventional radiology, are an extension of us and can do a lot of things that, you know, we just don't have time to get to. We're only one person. So yeah, that makes sense. That happened in both your training and in your practice. You know, sometimes residents feel a little inferior to PA sometimes, especially some that have been in the hospital working in the same place for a long time, but you don't realize how much you can learn from a veteran PA that's been in the same hospital doing the same stuff for years and years and years because I promise you they know what they're doing. Some of the IR PAs will be doing ports and putting ports in for years and years and years and years, 10, 12, 15,000 ports in their lifetime. As a new IR resident, you can learn so much from them if you just allow them to teach you. So I don't know. I've always been pro PA. I think if you use them correctly, your practice and your career and everything is going to be way better. So I hate when people call me a shill and no, I don't think PAs are going to replace doctors. PAs don't want to replace doctors and I don't think they're on the same level as doctors, but that's not the point of a PA. End rant. That was very passionate. Yeah, it was passionate. Sorry, I want to give up my chest. I see so many people comment and it drives me crazy because they just don't they don't know what they're worth. Just as a PA in my setting in the hospital, I was on the floors. I was assisting in the OR. The patients needed me. The nurses needed me. The social workers needed me. The attendings needed me. So we were always working as a team. No one was trying to replace anyone. Same in my Durham office. My doctor was able to see a lot more patients. We were able to give access to the community quicker. Like you instead of waiting a week, you were able to, you know, be seen that week for your new rash that erupted or whatever the case may be. So in the hospital, when I first started my first year residency in surgery, she was a surgery PA at the hospital and she taught me so much stuff because she had been working there for years prior. So if I didn't have her, I would probably want to learn a lot of stuff. You work together to get the job done and ensure you're delivering excellent patient care. That's just the way this and it's for me and all of my experiences with PAs I have almost every year I've worked with a ton of PAs. That's always how it's been. But I also like all my attending physicians, I've never had a bad encounter with any of them where they felt that I was trying to replace them. That's because those physicians are smart and they realize whatever asset you are to the team and not just, you know, something you're worried about. One of the things I want to talk about is a lot of people are worried about scope creep and saying they've said that because my wife's the PA, he supports scope creep and no what scope creep like PAs or MPs are trying to take hold of doctors jobs and they practice independently and whatnot. We can practice independently without a physician or without a supervising physician. So yeah, I know there are some specialties like anesthesia where a lot of the CNAs are pushing to practice independently and I think they've actually are able to do that now. But essentially nothing will replace a physician. And if you're worried about someone replacing you as a physician, make yourself irreplaceable. So I can say, I mean, I think that in health care, we need more hands. We need more people to be present when patients need anesthesia. We need more people in primary care and urging care, especially in the hospitals in the ICU. So I think that's where the mistake is like no one realizes why these professions came about. It's not to replace one another. It's just to have more hands on deck. You know, we're not talking about issues in New York City where there's tons of access to health care. We're talking about small towns and smaller states where they don't have many physicians per capita. A lot of the PAs and MPs they're pushing for independent practice and they're using the guys of you know, these smaller towns which a lot of them don't even have physicians in some of these small towns, which is crazy still because there aren't enough primary care physicians to go around. So we're trying to grab a straws here to find people who are educated enough to be primary care providers. All right, so if you have any questions or comments about this video, I feel like a lot of people are going to comment. Yeah, but I mean, like, please don't be rude. Yeah, don't be rude. And there's actually nothing to be rude about. But you know, I'm open to hearing your thoughts on it actually. So it's not like this is not to bring negativity. None of these videos are to bring any negative views. But yeah, it's just more of a time. Yeah, it's just more of a conversation where how I feel as a PA, how Michael feels as a physician and how you as a PA or MP or nurse or physician feel as well. So yeah, I'm curious to see your thoughts. Leave a comment below. Be nice to each other. Keep in mind, we're all in healthcare. We're all working together exactly. So, you know, why talk bad about someone else's career? So that's that. That's that. Follow me on Instagram and TikTok, follow Adriana on Instagram, try to get her to Tinkay. And we'll see you all on our next video. Bye.