Required Healthcare Experiences

Physician Assistant (PA) programs often value (and may require) direct patient care (DPC) experience and health related experience (HRE) as an important part of the application process.

Direct patient care (DPC) is defined as providing healthcare directly to patients, which can include hands-on contact, high-level decision making, or other aspects of direct responsibility. Examples of DPC include: taking vitals, bathing patients, helping patients transfer from bed to bedpan or toilet, walking patients, drawing blood, performing diagnostics, administering prescribed therapy or treatments, and counseling.

Additional health related experience (HRE) is considered to be an individual’s exposure to the healthcare field, the patients and the healthcare professionals caring for them, but the exposure doesn’t permit the individual to provide healthcare, or the exposure is outside of the medical setting. Examples of HRE may include: shadowing, transporting patients, patient education, clinical trial work other than DPC work itself, laboratory bench work, telephoning patients, non-nursing home health care, clerical work, electronic medical records work outside of patient care, and office work.

Patient care experience can be acquired on a paid or volunteer basis, as long as the recommended amount of time is met in an acceptable health care setting.

While there is no minimum number of hours required, applicants may want to consider a minimum of 500 hours, though for some programs, 1,000 or even 2,000 hours is needed to be competitive. There is much variation among Physician Assistant Programs regarding which type of experience is classified as ‘direct patient care’ and which falls under ‘additional healthcare experience.’ It is very important for students aspiring to gain admission to a physician assistant program to research the schools they want to apply to and take note of how each program classifies each type of experience. Please note that while schools may not have minimum requirements for these hours or experiences, it is important to consider the average number of hours of students who are being admitted to programs.