Physician Assistant Specialty Trends

     From its inception, the role of physician assistant was created as a way to ease the chronic shortage of primary care physicians. In fact, entry-level physician assistant training focuses on primary care with more clinical rotations in an outpatient setting than any other setting.

     Despite this fact, however, more and more physician assistants are choosing to pursue careers not in primary care, but in other medical specialties such as surgery, internal medicine, and as hospitalists. Further increasing this trend, the demand for physician assistants in surgical and medical subspecialties is increasing at a greater rate than that of primary care, creating more employment opportunities for physician assistants in subspecialties.

     The field of medicine has grown since physician assistants first started practicing. Because of this growth, physician assistants are branching out of the primary care specialty as the need for extra assistance in other specialties increases.

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