The new building, located on 7th St. and Van Buren, will house NAU's Physician Assistant graduate program, as a part of the Phoenix Biomedical Complex. (Photo by Daniel Daw)
NAU is responding to the need for more health professionals in Arizona by creating a graduate program for physician assistants in downtown Phoenix.
Starting this fall, the Health Sciences Education building will be open in the Phoenix Biomedical Complex and will be admitting 25 NAU graduate students into the first class for the Physician Assistant (PA) program.
Richard Dehn, founding chair of the program, said the program was formed in response to a need determined by the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR).
“This program was really a result of the ABOR doing a health professions workforce study about what the demand was and what were the unmet needs of medical providers in Arizona, and then looked at the current output and influx and population of different medical providers,” Dehn said.
He said the need for more health care professionals was only one essential piece the study revealed.
“One of the points of that study that was commissioned by ABOR was that there wasn’t a public Physician Assistant program,” Dehn said. “The two existing programs were in private osteopathic schools in Phoenix and the state needed a public PA program.”
Although the program is new to NAU, Dehn said he has spent much of his career teaching PA skills.
“I’ve always done PA education that’s aimed at dealing with workforce shortages,” Dehn said. “I’ve always been in programs and I’ve always worked in places — in public universities — where the PA program’s mission was to deal with underserved medical populations and trying to identify and train and graduate providers that would provide medical care in places where they’re needed.”
Katherine Look, a project coordinator with the program, said students will receive opportunities to gain experience all over Arizona.
“Well, I think that one of the most important things is the mission of the program, which is to train and provide health care workers for the people of Arizona,” Look said. “[Also,] students will have an opportunity to get experience through their rotations throughout the state in urban and rural areas.”
Dehn said the exposure of the students to different economic areas will prove beneficial, because physician assistants often do the same sort of work a physician would, but in lower-income areas.
“With tremendous physician shortages and particularly physicians choosing to go into high-paying jobs that are in specialties and in highly developed and pretty affluent areas as their first choice, then increasing the numbers of physician assistants and nurse practitioner graduated is going to address the medical needs in communities that physicians don’t necessarily gravitate towards.”
ASU recently pulled out of their position at the Biomedical Complex because of financial difficulties.
Leslie Schulz, executive dean of the college of Health and Human Services, said NAU was able to hold to its commitment due to a different approach.
“The way that we’re doing the Physician Assistant program is kind of a new model for NAU, in that it will have programs fees that will help pay for the entire program,” Schulz said. “In four years or so, it should be self- sufficient.”
Dehn said he sees the program as being very beneficial to both NAU and the state.
“This — and the expansion of the PT program down here, actually — are opportunities for NAU students that are interested in entering the health care professions,” Dehn said. “This is just more opportunity for them in what they do after they get their bachelor['s] degree at NAU.”
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