Physician assistants can help fill primary-care need

As George Samuel Bottomley led centers for physician-assistant studies from Pennsylvania to Maine over the past decade, he envisioned launching a center in Rhode Island. Today, he is at the helm of a new program at Johnson & Wales University that this fall received provisional accreditation by the Accreditation Review Commission on Education for the Physician Assistant Inc.
In October, JWU purchased a building at 157 Clifford St. in Providence’s Knowledge District and two parcels of land for $2.8 million and will spend an estimated $10.5 million to build a home for its new Center for Physician Assistant Studies.
Construction, which includes renovating the 18,000-square-foot building with state-of-the-art lecture halls, small conference rooms, and clinical skills and cadaver-based anatomy labs, is expected to be completed by March 2014. The first class of 24 students chosen from a field of more than 500 is slated to begin the following June.

PBN: As director of Johnson & Wales University’s new Physician Assistant Studies Program, what qualities are you looking for in applicants?
BOTTOMLEY: They need to have a history of academic excellence. They need to have demonstrated a philanthropic spirit toward people, and I don’t mean money. I would like to see them have a background in volunteerism and giving to something bigger than themselves. I’d like to see evidence of humanism in their everyday lives. Our mission is to graduate students who practice humanistic medicine for the greater good, to be able to empathize and understand the patient and who they are in relation to their community. It’s important for them to have a self-reflective capacity.

PBN: Describe the role of the physician’s assistant in today’s primary-care landscape. BOTTOMLEY: The profession is relatively young. The first graduate of a PA program was in 1967 from Duke University. It was designed to meet a shortage of primary-care providers at the beginning of the baby boom. Today, we are faced again with a real need for the extension of services provided by physicians. We need to find more people to provide primary care, whether it’s in primary care or in specialties, because that’s not going to be met by the current pipeline of health care providers. PAs typically don’t get the salaries that our physician colleagues do, but physicians have a lot more schooling. That’s one of our advantages. We’re able to train our students in a couple of years to be general practitioners, and health care providers find they can hire us at a rate that’s very affordable and enhance productivity.

PBN: Why did you leave your position as program director of the Physician Assistant Program at the University of New England in Portland, Maine to come to JWU?
BOTTOMLEY: I’ve been trying to start a PA program in Rhode Island for many years. The state and individual institutions just weren’t ready to make the investment, but Johnson & Wales decided as part of their strategic plan – in an attempt to diversify their portfolio – to do it. I’m a native Rhode Islander and it means a lot to me to come back and do something I think is very important for students and health care in the state.

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PBN: What are your primary goals for the new center and its master’s degree program?
BOTTOMLEY: Our mission is to graduate collaborative practitioners who practice humanistic medicine. I want to train students to a level where they’re going to be highly skilled providers and sought after in the medical community in Rhode Island and nationally. One thing that’s resonating with the health care institutions in the state that will be helping train our students is that they are eager to hire our students. Research shows students will stay in a state where they get their clinical training, so I’m hoping a majority of our graduates decide to stay in the state and practice, and demonstrate we’ve graduated a smart, kind, collaborative, problem-solving clinician.

PBN: You emphasize a holistic, humanistic, collaborative and empathetic approach to patient care. How will your JWU curriculum impart these principles and measure success?
BOTTOMLEY: We’re looking to identify students through the admissions process who already possess some of those qualities. But we’re a pilot program for the Arnold T. Gold Foundation, founded 40 years ago to bring the practice of humanistic medicine into the medical schools. They are collaborating with us to infuse curriculum into our program that will help develop those skills in our students. … We have a memorandum of understanding with the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University, whose mission is very similar to ours.

PBN: How do you expect Obamacare to play out in the health care arena and is there anything in your curriculum that will address how it may affect physician assistants?
BOTTOMLEY: Students will get lectures in health care policy, so they’ll be very familiar with the Affordable Care Act and they’ll be living through it. … One reason we’re being greeted with such a warm welcome in Rhode Island [is because, for] people who know what PAs can do, they’re really looking forward to us being a part of the solution. It takes a team. •

INTERVIEW
George Samuel Bottomley
POSITION: Director of the Center for Physician Assistant Studies at Johnson & Wales University, assistant dean for the Alan Shawn Feinstein Graduate School and full professor at the center
BACKGROUND: Born in Newport, Bottomley studied widely and has led or worked for physician-assistant centers across the U.S., including most recently at the University of New England in Portland, Maine.
EDUCATION: Bottomley earned a bachelor of science in research and development at the University of Rhode Island in 1973; doctor of veterinary medicine from Michigan State University in 1976; completed a residency in medicine and pathology at the University of Chicago in 1981; and a residency in veterinary pathology at Cornell University in 1985.
FIRST JOB: Stable boy in Portsmouth
RESIDENCE: Newport
AGE: 62

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