This week: Welcome to Physician Associate News!
It has already been a busy month of celebrating this excellent profession and all the brave souls who chose (and choose) to pursue it as a career. With PA Week in the rearview and the colors changing, we at PA News have returned our focus to the latest news and happenings most important to all of you. So grab a coffee (or something stronger) and settle in for another edition of the newsletter.
If someone shared this email with you, please consider paying it forward.
A new report finds many PAs still struggle with burnout, depression
A new Medscape report on burnout and depression among PAs found some alarming trends in a survey of nearly 800 members of the profession: 1 in 6 PAs said they felt burned out and depressed.
How is that possible: Depending on your experience, this number might seem too high or too low, but the results suggest deeper issues with the profession. In fact, 35% of respondents reported only feeling burned out, while 6% reported only feeling depressed. Some simple back-of-the-napkin math reveals more than half of respondents struggled with at least one of them.
If those numbers aren’t troubling enough, most respondents said their occupation is the dominant driver of their negative experiences — including 83% of men and 75% of women who answered the survey.
The worst part might be that burnout appears to be more chronic than ever — 44% of respondents claimed their burnout had lasted for more than 2 years. That’s more than double the results from the 2022 survey, which revealed a mere 20% of PAs felt this way.
“Healthcare asks clinicians to absorb an extraordinary amount of responsibility, urgency, emotional weight, and administrative burden and then somehow leave it all at work. Burnout may show up at home, but that doesn't mean it started there.”
Why is this happening: According to the survey, it’s the bureaucracy. Oh, the bureaucracy!
Charting and other “paperwork” was the main reason for burnout according to 57% of PAs surveyed — a little less than when they survey was conducted in 2024 (58%).
But poor compensation (49%), too many hours on the job (39%), and lack of professional respect from colleagues and bosses (38%) were high on the list as well. In short, PAs feel like they are working too hard for too little money and no respect.
Is there a silver-lining: The report found that 44% of PAs felt neither depressed nor burned out. And the overall share of PAs who reported feeling depressed and burned out fell from 23% in 2024 to 15% this year.
Plus, survey participants received a $100 amazon gift card — that counts as a silver-lining, right?
The Handoff: The survey identified several ways to curb the burnout and improve professional life for PAs. Namely, PAs need more money (57%).
Respondents also said lighter patient loads (47%), manageable schedules (39%), and more staff supporting them (36%) would make things better as well.
Most participants also said they combat burnout by talking with family and friends, exercising, and sleeping. Meanwhile, a vanishingly low number claimed to turn to less healthy self-care options, such as prescription drugs, drinking, or smoking.
PAs might be OK, after all.
Robots won’t save PAs, but it doesn’t stop them from trying
A new study found that nearly 1 million US-based clinicians submitted 271 million queries in OpenEvidence, the AI-powered medical knowledge platform — and it looks like PAs were the power users.
Running the numbers: Over the 2.5-year study window, the researchers found that PAs — along with NPs — submitted 44.5 queries per month compared to 37.5 for physicians.
But this is burying the lead, the researchers also found the number of monthly active users exploded during the course of the study from 355 in January 2024 to more than 700,000 in June 2026.
The AI takeover: What are hundreds of thousands of clinicians searching hundreds of millions of times anyway?
The analysis found that most queries were about clinical decision-making. For PAs, NPs, and physicians, most queries were related to clinical knowledge — such as medication or disease information — but PAs also sought out information from literature searches and guidelines.
Still, the most common queries were focused on treatment and management.
What does this mean: It’s a cross-sectional study of the data from OpenEvidence, so it’s hard to draw sweeping conclusions about the future of healthcare and the looming AI takeover.
How the researchers felt it reinforced some pre-existing ideas:
“Taken together, these findings suggest that the relationship between clinicians and clinical knowledge is changing,” the researchers wrote. “For much of modern medicine, clinicians have been expected to internalize a body of knowledge through training and maintain it through continuing education. Study findings suggest a growing share of knowledge access is shifting from recall to retrieval.”
“Sustained, widespread use suggests these tools address an unmet need in clinical practice. Nonphysician clinicians accounted for more than 40% of users, and nurse practitioners and physician assistants used the platform at least as intensively as physicians.”
The Handoff: The researchers see the results as a sign of the times — and the findings suggests AI as a tool for all clinicians is here to stay. Whether they are sufficiently studied will be a bigger question though.
“These findings highlight the growing role of AI-enabled clinical information platforms in clinical practice and suggest that efforts to evaluate, teach, and integrate AI in clinical medicine should be informed by empirical studies of its use in actual practice,” they wrote.
Ultimately, they emphasized the need for clinicians, administrators, tech bros, and policy makers to work together to make our AI future one that improves the human practice of medicine.
“Whether this transition improves the quality and efficiency of care will depend on the accuracy of these tools, the training clinicians receive in using them, and the willingness of institutions to adapt how AI is taught, evaluated, and governed,” they concluded.
Physician Associates in the News
To commemorate PA week, PAs took over The Today Show Plaza.
One PA is making sure her small Montana town has access to cancer care, showing that PAs can “be an anchor for specialty care outreach” in rural communities.
The West Texas PA program at Texas Tech University has expanded access to healthcare across their region, especially in the rural communities, thanks to training more than 1,000 PA graduates since its founding.
Meanwhile, the PA studies program at The University of Southern Mississippi earned provisional accreditation — it will welcome its first class in January.
In another first for PA programs, the inaugural class of the UC San Diego School of Medicine’s PA program graduated earlier this month.
While healthcare faces a workforce shortage, one PA warns that training more PAs should only be part of the solution.