this happens in Germany. I know our healthcare systems are different but there are way more north American members on lemmy than German ones. I’m simply listening to points of view. What a physician assistant does is fairly the same in both countries.
As said, I’m a nurse working bedside and I don’t plan to this sometimes sh*tjob for the rest of my life. I don’t like dealing with my coworker’s petty problems and their need to talk and criticize people behind their backs.
Reasons to study PA are I’m cerebral and prefer to read and learn than to talk, I like knowing my medicines and therapies, interpreting EKGs, explaining to patients what they should and shouldn’t do, checking labor parameters to decide if we have to increase or decrease an antibiotic… I don’t want to work bedside with a growing old, overweight and demented patient population (already punched twice and proposed to have sex 2 times as well). I don’t want to be ridiculed by my coworkers each time I open a book to read about medicine simply because I want to know more.
Doctors where I am are usually mature coworkers. I don’t mean all doctors are grown ups (they are not) but there are more grown ups among the doctors than among the nurses: nurses I work with love to talk about sex and tiktok and going to smoke whereas doctors usually talk about patients and therapies, at least most of them when I hear them.
Overall doctors seem to be less chatty with less drama and more professional, more grown up.
I know that as a PA I’m not a doctor and I’d only earn EUR 300 per month more than now as a nurse and I’m still thinking if it pays to study 3 years to earn just a bit more, not really much more but hopefully work with grown ups.
This is not something I’d pay myself but I’d have to find a hospital that offers a bachelor as a PA as a so called Duales Studium where you work 50% and study the other 50% but you still receive your normal salary, but for this I’d have to move 200 km south.
If you’re a PA or plan to become one, am I being naive? Is there really less drama?
Do you regret it?
From a US perspective. Depending on the specialty a PA will do 99% of what a doctor does. In more surgical specialities they tend to do most of the pre and post op work. The US also has NPs (nurse practitioners) which are very similar in function to a PA. The big difference is that an NP is taught medicine from a nursing perspective, while a PA is more explicit in the partnership with a doctor. As a PA or NP you would be more of a peer with a doctor, so you would likely see different sides of doctors and nurses than you currently do.
You can expect different drama, maybe not less. I can’t say what specifically would be the case in Germany. In the US it’s mostly about balancing patient care with paperwork, and battling insurance companies. The ratio of practicing medicine vs bureaucratic bullshit is currently very skewed towards bureaucracy in the US.
A European PA is more like a US NP afaik
I think this is a drama I can live with. What I meant with drama is gossip among the nurses: who had sex with whom, who has how many children, who said what about somebody else… something I hate with a burning passion.
Maybe I’m naive? I still find this bureaucratic drama easier to survive than my current coworkers.