The 80-Hour Resident Work Rule

The 80-Hour Resident Work Rule

In the past, there was conflict with the number of hours medical residents were allowed to work in one week. If you have ever heard of Libby Zion, then you know exactly why that is. She was a patient who died at the age of 18 of serotonin syndrome under the care of what her father considered ‘overworked residents’ and ‘intern physicians’. Because of this, ACGME (the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education) adopted a regulation similar to the Libby Zion Law, also known as the NY State Department of Health Code, Section 405. The regulation put a clinical-hour (‘duty’) maximum on all ‘residents’ of accredited medical training institutions. These ‘duty hours’ are limited to 80 hours per week, averaged over a four-week period, inclusive of all in-house call activities and all moonlighting’ as stated in the ACGME Common Duty Hour Requirements document. The document also states that PGY-1 (postgraduate year-1) residents are currently limited to duty periods of 16-hours duration, while PGY-2 residents are limited to a maximum of 24 hours of continuous duty in the hospital.

20 Phone Apps for Physician Assistants

20 Phone Apps for Physician Assistants
With the immersion and implementation of EMR,  medical phone applications has drastically changed - for the better. As a physician assistant or PA student, you will tasked with “keeping up with the Jones’” in order to monitor the progress of your patients and keep patients interested enough to want to monitor themselves. Products like the Apple Watch and the FitBit have already proven that patients want to monitor their vitals, we just needed a better, easier, and more efficient way for them to do it. I have found the following applications interesting enough to implement into my own practice, but I have not listed any applications for studying here. Instead, these apps offer a variety of services and resources available to you for your patient interaction and monitoring. Take a look at some of them and let me know what you think. If you have found an app that you think is better than some of these listed, let me know in the comments section and I’ll definitely check them out. Thanks for reading!

Practicing EKGs for Physician Assistants

Practicing EKGs for Physician Assistants

I get a lot of requests about EKG/ECG courses in preparation for PA school or the PANCE and numerous people searching for EKG courses are re-routed to my blog, so I put a list of them together for your convenience. I hope that pre-PA students, PA-S, and PA-C are all able to utilize these resources and find one convenient, affordable, and suitable to their situation. I’ve tried to list costs and details about some of them, but they’re all very different and some of them are so new they don’t have reviews yet. They range from basic to intermediate and advanced ECG interpretation. Later, I talk about in-person courses and even free resources. There are also books that you can purchase to help you study, which is how I studied EKGs and I found it most helpful to practice strips - lots and lots of them. If you’re feeling ambitious or you work in cardiology, you might consider becoming certified in EKGs, and I provide information about that below as well. Good luck in your studies to becoming a better PA and understanding these rhythms!

Online Physician Assistant Programs

First Online PA Program

By now you’ve surely heard of the first Physician Assistant, excuse me, Physician Associate program wanting to go “live”. What I mean by this is a fully incorporated didactic online program in medicine resulting in the completion of a master's degree without any prior PA training (no certificate, associate’s or bachelor’s degree in PA studies). Yale first announced this news on March 10th, 2015 and while it has had mixed feelings from across the PA and physician community, technology is changing, education is changing, and the realm of the physician assistant must change too. In this article I will brief you on the background of the program and hopefully provide an unbiased approach to online physician assistant programs.

The introduction of Yale School of Medicine's online Physician Associate program has definitely stirred about much debate. Schools like Yale have an outstanding reputation of graduating highly skilled and well-trained physician associates/assistants, but in April of 2015 ARC-PA did approve their initial proposal, as an increase in class size was necessary.