There was an interesting confluence of news items in the March 30th issue of AAPA News. Perhaps you noticed it too. One headline announced the passing of Malcolm Beinfield, MD,1 and another highlighted the opening of the Eugene A. Stead, Jr. Center for Physician Assistants in Durham, NC.2 These two events—one sad, one celebratory—seem very much connected in my mind, even though Dr. Beinfield's contribution to the PA profession began 30 years ago and the opening of the Stead Center was in February of this year. But first, a bit of PA history.
How I became a PA
Dr. Beinfield, a general surgeon at the Norwalk Hospital-Yale University School of Medicine, Norwalk, Conn, founded a postgraduate, community-hospital-based surgical program for PAs in 1976. He served as the program's medical director for the next 20 years. It was a telephone conversation with Dr. Beinfield (whose colleague, incidentally, took out my mother's inflamed appendix) that set the wheels in motion for my becoming a PA. I'll bet this story, albeit with different details, is similar to yours.
In 1977, while I was idly perusing the local paper, pausing to read the police reports, the obituaries, and what was playing at the Fine Arts Cinema, I saw a picture of Dr. Beinfield with about half a dozen people, all of whom were wearing long, white coats, standing in front of the local hospital in Norwalk, Conn. By what they were wearing, I thought these folks must be related to the medical profession in some way. In the photo's caption (there was no accompanying article), the people standing next to Dr. Beinfield were identified as physician assistants (whatever they were)—not doctors, not nurses, not emergency medical technicians, and not any other medical professional that I had ever heard of.
At the time, I was working for an heirloom collectibles company—the furthest away you can get from anything “medical.” The salary was good, the challenge was fair, but the satisfaction was small. Something about the photograph of medical somethings-or-other piqued my curiosity. I needed to know more. To my regret, I had gone only halfway toward becoming a baccalaureate nurse 12 years earlier. I could still be sparked by what might be an opportunity to enter the medical profession.
I went to the telephone book, riffled through the pages, found Dr. Beinfield's office number, and called him. When we finally connected, I told him I had seen the picture in the paper. I asked, “What are physician assistants, and what are they doing at Norwalk Hospital?” I can't recall exactly what he said, but he very briefly described a profession that sparked me even further. He then said, “Go talk to the people at Yale,” a 40-minute drive from where I lived. Within a week, I had an appointment with Yale's PA program director, from whom I learned the basic information about PAs—how the profession developed, what training was required, and what PAs did when they graduated. The proverbial bell rang in my head, it seemed almost instantaneously, and I believe I said out loud, “I want to be a PA!”
How right this decision seemed at the time. How right it still feels today, almost 30 years later. I have never regretted it, even though I had to jump through a few hoops to be accepted into a PA program and through a lot of other hoops along the way. Since entering PA school, I've heard many personal stories from other PAs. Amazingly, whenever I've asked them to tell me how they became interested in being a PA, what I've heard makes it clear that the same bell went off for them. Almost all the PAs I've talked to have described having the same “aha!” moment when they learned about PAs and saying to themselves, “That's what I want. I want to be a PA.”