Brandon O
Puzzled by facies
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Since the AMA created PAs they will always be somehow under the supervision of a Doc, to what extent largely depends on what state they are in.
Who knows. They haven't been very active pursuing this, but it does mostly depend on the state, not on who created what.
I think another consideration in deciding NP or PA depends on what type of practice you want to have. ED and surgical specialties seem to have a larger proportion of PAs, and generally PA training seems to be more geared towards this; neonatal, pediatric, and psych specialties seems to much more strongly prefer NPs, I suspect that this is largely due to NP training tracks specific to these practice areas.
There are some specialty oriented training programs for PAs, but they seem to have more flexibility in choosing their practice areas than NPs. This used to be the case with FNPs, but there has been a bigger push recently in some areas to have primary care NPs (compared to NNP, PNP-AC, and AGAC) to only practice in outpatient settings.
Agree that PAs are usually more suited to surgical work. As I understand it NPs usually need to undertake additional training to assist in the OR.
True that NPs are a bit more specialized in training (roughly specialized programs versus fully generalist NP programs), but how much this matters seems to vary. I have certainly seen FNPs working in the acute care setting.