 CNA, CMA, RT, EMT, RN, PT, OT, DC, Scribe, Paramedic, MD from a foreign country. What's the best patient care experience for PA school? This might be right, either you feel it or you don't might give it a try, yeah. Care experience and is it different from health care experience? Patient care experience is where you are directly responsible for patient care. This is hands-on experience and it's usually paid experience. Health care experience is anytime you're working in the health care field and you're getting any kind of knowledge and experience with patients, but you are not directly responsible for patient care. Both of these are good, but when PA schools say you need a minimum number of hours to apply, they're talking about patient care experience or PCE. Now this is very school specific, but some health care experience that's not patient care experience may be counted on a percentage basis. For instance, I had about 2,000 hours of research experience and the school that I'm currently attending gave me 50% for it, so my 2,000 hours of research experience counted as the equivalent of 1,000 hours of patient care experience. But again, very school specific, you'll have to research your specific schools that you're applying to to make sure something like this can apply to you. Patient care experience or PCE is either required or strongly recommended for every American PA program. Some schools, like Bay Path University, only require 500 hours of patient care experience, whereas other programs, like MedEx Northwest, require 2,000 hours of patient care experience. And if you look on their website, they say these are the minimums, but the most competitive applicants usually have much more than this. Schools also differ in whether they want this experience to be paid or unpaid, so for instance, Bay Path does not specify and MedEx says that they want their experience to be paid. So, since you need patient care experience in order to apply to PA school, what's the best PCE for you? Here are some things to help you decide. Some experiences take longer to get trained for and licensed for before you can even start getting hours. For example, here is a CNA course that only takes 31 days to complete and then you can start working as a CNA, but it takes about 3 months to be certified as an EMT and 2 years to be certified as a paramedic. So it really depends on what your timeline is, how quickly you want to start getting patient care experience hours, and how important it is to you, what kind of job you do to get those hours. Another thing to consider is that jobs are inherently different in the environments in which they work. So, if you're most comfortable and thrive in a fast-paced, exciting environment like the ER, then maybe scribing or working as an ER tech would be the best way for you to get your PCE. If you really love taking care of seniors, then CNA is a great way to get patient care experience, and you can get started pretty quickly and nursing homes are always hiring. Are you fascinated by surgery and do you thrive in an organized, systematic kind of environment? Maybe a surgical tech would be the best way for you to get your PCE. Every experience teaches you different skills. For instance, ER scribing allowed me to see patients from all walks of life and introduced me to a huge variety of disease state and also made me very comfortable with medical terminology. Then, as a medical assistant, I was able to apply that knowledge and actually get hands-on experience with patients and practice taking a history, taking vitals, talking to patients, which I think was extremely important for me to learn before actually going to PA school. One thing to keep in mind is that scribing is not exactly hands-on patient care experience. You're not directly interacting with patients. Even though you learn a lot and you see a lot, you're not hands-on with the patient. So some schools consider scribing to be patient care experience and some schools really like scribes. Some schools, however, do not count scribing to be patient care experience and they count it to be health care experience. So again, very school-specific, you want to research the schools that you're applying to before you decide to get a job as a scribe. So what if you already have a medical career, like you're an RT, a respiratory therapist, or a PT, a physical therapist, and you're thinking about switching careers to go be a PA? Depending on how long you've been practicing, you probably have thousands and thousands of patient contact hours, which will definitely set you apart from a lot of the applicants. And your experience will be tremendously helpful to your classmates in PA school. For instance, in my class, we have a respiratory therapist and his experience was definitely very helpful when we were learning about ABGs and generally studying the respiratory system. So if you have one of these careers and you're thinking of making the switch to PA school, just get whatever pre-rex you need, take the GRE if you need it, and go ahead and apply to PA school. In my class, just about every kind of PCE is represented and no one experience is better than the others. We actually work as a team and draw from everyone's experience and knowledge to fill in our own knowledge gaps and to solve problems. So I know this was in the disclaimer at the beginning of the video, but I have to repeat that I am not a PA school admissions professional and everything I'm telling you is based on my experience as a PA student and a PA school applicant and my own personal research and conversations with admissions staff. So I have to remind you that every PA school is different and I urge you to do your own research. My goal is to help give you some ideas, not to make a comprehensive guide to getting PCE for every single school. With that being said, if you got any value out of this video, please like it, subscribe to my channel, share the video with anyone you think can get some value out of it, and if you'd like to get my help personally, just shoot me an email. And I'll see you in the next one.