 that people who come from the backgrounds of the patients that they serve just are better suited to communicate and to provide care to those people. Hey guys, my name is Boris, I'm a physician assistant, and I wanna make a quick video about diversity in the PA physician assistant profession. First things first, let's define the terms. What is diversity within a profession? To me, diversity within a profession is the representation of multiple different socioeconomic, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic groups within that profession. And one way to explain what diversity is is to give examples of what it is not. So for instance, if the vast majority of a PA school class and or the PA profession is only representing one socioeconomic, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and I would even say sex and gender category, then by definition that profession is not very diverse. The PA profession, if you may have noticed, is not very diverse and research actually does back that up. So to start this video off and then just riff on it a little bit, I'm going to actually read a paragraph from the introduction to my book, step-by-step physician assistant, personal statement writing, and other PA school application secrets. And it's right in the beginning in the section called Why This Book Was Written. Spoiler alert, one of the reasons this book was written is to increase diversity in the PA profession. Here we go. In my pre-PA coaching business, I help a lot of people get into PA school. I've noticed that the majority of my customers are immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and veterans as in US military veterans. Many PA schools have commitments to diversity on their websites, which claim to actively recruit students from underrepresented populations. Unfortunately, according to an article from the PA life cited below, and I'll put the citation in the information for the video, only 23% of first year PA students are non-caucasian. So, and they get these stats a little bit further. And it's 12%, Hispanic or Latino, 10.9% Asian, 9.2% other, 6.5% multiracial, 6.4% Pacific Islander, or Native American, 5.9% Black or African American, and 2.5% American Indian or Alaskan Native. And I also put in a caveat. I realized that this does not add up to 100%. It adds up to a whole lot more than 100%. And my assumption is that some people surveyed, selected more than one category anyway. Only 23%, 23% of first year PA students were non-caucasian, which means, very quick math here, is that 77? 77%, take me a look the other way, 77% of the PA profession is Caucasian, 23% non-caucasian. Not very diverse, okay? Going on, only 28.5% are male, which means, what is that, 72? 71.5% female, so 71.5% female, 77% Caucasian. Basically, more than three out of four times, if you see a PA, they are a Caucasian female, is what this means. And then also, according to a 2015 study, I recognize this is eight years ago at this point, but a 2015 study by Mikata et al, again, I'll link it down below, only 4%, 4% of PA students at that time were US military veterans. Now, that might not seem like a big deal. I'm not sure what the percentage of the US population is that served in the military, but it's probably around 5%. I think I've heard somewhere around those numbers. However, in the PA profession, particularly, it was a profession designed specifically for US military medics, so Army medics and Navy corpsmen coming back from the Vietnam War to apply those skills to fill the provider shortage at the time. So it's literally a profession designed for US military veterans, and at the time of this study, only 4% of PA students were military veterans. That's why I see that as kind of a problem. So, I conclude by saying, as a US military veteran working as a physician assistant, a profession designed to take advantage of the unique skills and experiences that veterans have, I want to help change these statistics, and I hope this book will help to make things a little more fair. Okay, so that's that. You might be asking me, why is diversity even important in the PA profession? And I would answer that in different ways based on the different kinds of diversity we're talking about. Specifically for veterans, I already kind of said by piece, it's a profession literally designed to take advantage of a veteran's unique skillset and adaptability, and the fact that at that time, only 4% of PA students were veterans, and also being a veteran myself, I think that's kind of not right, and I want to increase the amount of veterans in the PA profession. That's one. Two, totally different kind of diversity. If we're talking about ethnic, racial, and I would say linguistic diversity, if somebody is Caucasian and only speaks English, it would be not necessarily difficult for them to relate to someone who is not like that and who might speak a different language, who might have a different skin color, different culture, different ethnic background. I'm not saying that a Caucasian could not provide very, very good quality medical care to somebody who is not Caucasian. I myself, being Caucasian, think that I provide very good medical care to all kinds of different people from all walks of life, all different backgrounds. That's not the point. The point is people from different backgrounds see things differently. Everybody's an individual, I get that, but as a whole people from different backgrounds have different perspectives, which is good. We need that everywhere, and we definitely need it in medicine, and we definitely need it in the PA profession, which is why, like I said, I wrote this book and I wanna try to diversify the PA profession. That's one. Two, for people in those communities, for instance, myself coming from a Russian background, whenever I would meet, especially an elderly Russian patient that would barely speak English, they spoke only Russian, they're culturally Russian, everybody they know is Russian just because they don't speak English. They were brought to this country at 50, 60, 70 years old. They related to me and they listened to me much more so than somebody who's English speaking and was using a translator to even be able to basically rudimentary communicate with this person in Russian. So from a very, very personal experience, I understand that people who come from the backgrounds of the patients that they serve just are better suited to communicate and to provide care to those people. Will it be every single person? No, absolutely not, but getting more representation from different cultures, different languages, different backgrounds into the PA profession will only strengthen the profession overall. And that's all I have to say about that. If you do wanna get a copy of this book, I'll put the link to the Amazon link in the description for this video. Basically, I just focus on writing your essay from the ground up if you're having difficulty even getting started on your personal statement, as well as a bunch of other tips for CASPOT and just your general PA application in general. All right, guys, hope you enjoyed that. Let me know what you think in the comments and I'll see you in the next video.