Diversity among health care professionals is important. PAthways is a program that pairs minority graduates with mentors. The goal is boosting the number of PAs in underserved communities.
Physician assistants see patients
Physician assistants see patients in this video provided by the American Academy of Physician Associates.
- Diversity is crucial in healthcare, as evidenced by disparities in the quality of care received by Black patients compared to their white counterparts.
- Initiatives like PAthways aim to increase diversity among physician assistants, addressing the lack of representation and fostering trust within minority communities.
- Having healthcare providers who understand and reflect the cultural background of their patients can lead to improved communication, trust and ultimately, better health outcomes.
Diversity matters.
Someone needs to say it.
Even though it has been self-evident in American history for those who bother to read about our country’s rich history.
Even when we have too many politicians and companies cowed into saying otherwise by an unfavorable turn against diversity in today’s political climate.
Diversity matters in the healthcare field, like everywhere.
For example, we know from hard data that Black patients receive a lesser standard of care than their white counterparts. The reasons are several, including a lack of access to quality care. But one reason is that many Black people report that they are not truly believed by their physicians about the level of pain they report. The trust isn’t there.
We all do better when we choose not to ignore such things. Quality care for any leads to quality care for all and, if nothing else, reduces costs in the health insurance system we all share.
That is why I fully support training initiatives for young docs in medical school on interacting with different types of people. It is not hate that undergirds any systemic racism in medicine; it is people living in their demographic silos — and a lack of ethnic diversity among medical professionals.
Psychiatry PA sparked by encounter in middle school
So of course, I back programs like PAthways, which pairs minority students and college graduates with mentors who are physician assistants, who often serve as patients’ primary care providers. The goal is to get more minorities into a field where their numbers lag. Fayetteville is one of three pilot PAthway programs around the country; the others are in Washington, D.C., and the New York area. The program is sponsored by the American Academy of Physician Associates.
Rashadah Jordan, a psychiatry physician assistant at a Fayetteville psychiatric practice, is mentoring two future PAs through PAthways. The New Jersey native grew up mostly in South Carolina. She told me that she was influenced to consider PA work by a presentation she heard as an eighth-grade student enrolled in a minority mentors program through an Area Health Education Center. The presentation was by a Black, female physician assistant in primary care out of Greenville.
“I didn’t know what a PA was,” Jordan says with a laugh. “After the presentation, I got her card. And she was like, ‘OK, you can email me anytime.’”
Jordan adds: “I saw myself in that role because of her. Had I not been exposed to that I wouldn’t even know if PA was possible for me.”
Fayetteville psychiatry PA: ‘I am getting more patients of color’
Jordan’s specialty, mental health health care, is one of particularly great need in the Black community. Black medical professionals constitute just 2% of psychiatrists, according to the American Psychiatric Association. There is also a well-spring of distrust and a stigma about mental health care among some Black Americans; studies show about 25% of Black Americans seek mental health treatment compared to 40% of white Americans.
Jordan has observed that mistrust of medicine in action. Her grandmother, she says, was born circa 1935.
“Even she didn’t have a primary care provider, she used her OB-GYN for her overall doctor,” she says.
Jordan finds psychiatry rewarding and fell in love with it during clinical trials. It requires empathy, something she is good at.
“I saw myself in every last one of those patients,” she says.
She has seen some lingering skepticism over psychiatric care break down, even among parents from the older generation where skepticism is more prevalent.
“I will say I am getting more patients of color,” she said. “Even the parents who come from that generation or was born of that generation, they are a little more open. They are bringing their kids to come see me …”
Some will confess they have ignored their feelings for years and maybe Jordan can treat them, too.
“And I do end up seeing the whole family.”
Recent Fayetteville State graduate says mentor is encouraging
Tamera Robinson, one of Jordan’s mentees through PAthways, describes her relationship with Jordan as one of big sister-little sister. Robinson graduated from Fayetteville State University in December with a degree in organism biology and is planning to enroll in a PA school — typically a 27- to 28-month program.
Robinson, who is originally from Salisbury, said Jordan encourages her to focus on what path she really wants to take as a PA. For Robinson, the paths she is choosing from include oncology — her interest was sparked by her late mother’s fight with colon cancer — and pediatrics.
As for pediatrics, she says: “I’m just good with kids. I feel like I have a kid’s heart. I feel like I live vicariously through kids so I think I would like to work with kids.”
She said she believes more Black students in her generation are considering jobs in the medical field.
They are starting to see, “we can break through and make more ways for others that are behind us.”
Program to increase minority PAs a piece of health care puzzle
PAthways is one piece of a very large and very complex healthcare puzzle, and I wish it nothing but Godspeed. The need is there.
I believe because it is a private organization’s initiative it should be insulated from the anti-diversity fever that I believe will eventually pass — because it is not tenable long-range in an ever-diverse country.
For Black patients, being treated by someone who looks like them can give them “a sense of security, a sense of comfortability,” Jordan says.
“And a sense of, ‘Oh, you’re not going to label me or misdiagnose me or mistreat me, because there in some little inkling of trust, like OK, you’re Black, I’m Black, you’re going to do right by me.”
Opinion Editor Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com.