Featured Stories tagged with "physician assistant"

In a fitting tribute to the founding of the physician assistant (PA) profession by four U.S. Navy corpsmen, Touro College’s Graduate School of Health Sciences is offering scholarships for its PA program to individuals who have actively served in any branch of the U.S. Armed Services at any time.

In the clinical phase of the PA program, students undergo ten mandatory rotations – eight core and two elective, each for several weeks, at hospitals, clinics, or other sites. Ruth Pierre-Louis, SHS, Manhattan PA-S ’16 completed her advanced elective rotation in the competitive New York Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Center’s Transplant Surgery Department. Here are the highlights of her experience.

The new clinical coordinator for Touro College’s School of Health Sciences Physician Assistant program has been around the world – literally. A petite woman with long sandy-colored hair and lots of spunk, Mary Showstark sits behind her desk in a basement office at the Touro College School of Health Sciences, her computer desktop graced with a dazzling background photograph taken in Tahiti. The photo depicts a dozen would-be surfers on boats and jet skis on the shelf of the massive 60-foot wave during a storm swell, calmly waiting under the wall of water for what appear to the untrained eye to be their imminent demise.

When Thomas Bily was offered three different positions after graduating from Touro’s School of Health Science Physician Assistant (PA) program in Bay Shore, he did what any talented graduate would do: he took all of them. 

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Penina Smith has the distinction of being the only PA who is also a certified athletic trainer. She had been fascinated by medicine ever since she dissected a sheep’s brain in eighth grade. Upon entering GW, she joined the Athletic Training program. While she enjoyed the classes in anatomy and physiology, she said that she didn’t much like having to be on call on the weekends and being at six a.m. football practice. During the course of her studies, she shadowed an orthopedic surgeon and met a PA and realized that being a PA might be a good career choice for her.

It was her own interaction with a Physician Assistant (PA) that inspired Rachel Farahan, a 2013 graduate of the School of Health Sciences’ PA Program. At the age of 20, she battled a serious illness, and remains grateful for the care she received. Now, as she begins tending to others, Farahan is determined to make anyone who visits her for treatment or consultation feel comfortable. "Patients have no reason to apologize for having questions and needing help," she says, and it’s a philosophy that may just help her save lives.

Graduates of Touro’s School of Health Sciences (SHS) Physician Assistants (PA) program were awarded their diplomas on Sept. 13 at Long Island University’s Tilles Center for the Performing Arts. The new PAs are the latest graduates of the program that has offered PA accreditation since 1972, shortly after the field was created. Students from the Winthrop extension campus spoke about how they managed intense and rewarding classes with clinical rotations and family commitments. One advantage of being PA? PA’s enjoy the ability to work in a wide-range of medical specialties.

It was Physician Assistant (PA) Phillip Maxwell’s first Christmas shift at Elmhurst Hospital Center. A patient arrived at the emergency room—a young man who had fainted. While the patient had a clean medical history, Maxwell saw something troubling in his EKG.  

A Touro School of Health Sciences alumnus was named New Jersey State Physician Assistant of the Year. PA John Albanese, who graduated in 2011 from the Bay Shore program, credited Touro with his success.