AAPA Attends Important HRSA Future of Primary Care Workforce Summit
AAPA was recently invited to participate in a future of primary care workforce summit, organized by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the meeting — The Healthcare Workforce Crisis: A Summit on the Future of Primary Care in Rural and Urban American — was to create a forum for discussion to generate new and innovative ideas about primary care workforce issues, discover potential solutions for rural and urban underserved communities, and to bring together stakeholders such as PAs to share best practices and strategies for future action.
“We need more wishful recommendations, we need your ideas — your actionable proposals,” said HRSA Administrator Mary K. Wakefield in her opening remarks. “This conference was built from the ground up to yield those proposals. It is my hope that this summit helps to shed some light on how to build and sustain a primary care workforce.”
Several PAs and members of AAPA staff were in attendance and spoke at the summit. Theresa Horvath, a PA and program director at Hofstra University PA’s Program, addressed the attendees on the subject of Innovative Community Based Practice – Training into Practice. Steven Shelton, a PA and assistant vice president, community outreach and executive director of East Texas Area Health Education Center (AHEC) at the University of Texas Medical Branch talked about community-based training and building bridges between organizations, states, and communities. Marie White, a PA student from George Washington University was part of a panel that presented a student’s perspective. And Kim Beer, assistant director of federal affairs at AAPA, was a panelist discussing primary care workforce development and health reform.
AAPA’s message at the summit: PAs are important part of the solution to the healthcare workforce shortage; it is critical that Congress support expansion of PA programs; PAs are key to health care reform but to be fully utilized, current barriers to care that exist in federal law must be addressed; PAs must be fully integrated into new models of care, and that the Medicare physician payment system must be part of health care reform.
A complete transcript of the summit will be made available on the HRSA Web site.
Doug Scott, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
