An evaluation of the effect of Physician Assistants on medical students and residents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective Many sites that employ Physician Assistants (PAs) within Manitoba are medical teaching facilities. This study aimed to evaluate medical student and resident perceptions of PAs. Four major topics were addressed in this study; the impact of the PA on the medical learner, the PA role, the competency of the PA, and the overall reduction of workload with a PA on service. Methods A cross-sectional questionnaire was distributed to 220 medical students in their third or fourth year, and 150 first year residents enrolled at the University of Manitoba. Participants who self-indicated they had rotated through a service which employs a PA were included in this study. Results Results from this study were generally positive. From the perspective of medical learners, PAs were perceived to be competent (83.6%) and promote continuity of care (72.4%). Participants indicated daily interactions with the PAs on service (85.7%) with adequate collaboration (73.5%) and communication (79.6%). Results regarding the PA role were indeterminate, with only 39.5% of participants having indicated a defined role for the PA on service, while 85.8% had indicated the PA role overlapped with their own. Overall only half (50.1%) of participants felt like the PAs aided in their medical training. Conclusion This study showed that PAs have had some impact on medical education, but a clear benefit could not be determined. While PAs in Manitoba are meeting the points indicated in the quality initiatives and resident work hour reduction, there is a considerable disagreement when it comes a defined role and hierarchy of PAs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".