Challenges and opportunities in building a sustainable rural primary care workforce in alignment with the Affordable Care Act: the WWAMI program as a case study.

The authors examine the potential impact of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) on a large medical education program in the Northwest United States that builds the primary care workforce for its largely rural region. The 42-year-old Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho (WWAMI) program, hosted by the University of Washington School of Medicine, is one of the nation's most successful models for rural health training. The program has expanded training and retention of primary care health professionals for the region through medical school education, graduate medical education, a physician assistant training program, and support for practicing health professionals.

Physician assistants in orthopedic practice. A national study.

Unlabelled: Orthopedics is the third most common specialty practiced by physician assistants (PAs), but little is known at a national level about PAs backgrounds or specific contributions to orthopedic practices. We sought to describe, from a nationally representative sample, the demographic and practice characteristics of PAs working in orthopedics.

Methods: Surveys were sent to 1,200 PAs, identified from American Academy of Physician Assistants data, who reported orthopedics as their specialty between 2005 and 2007.

Working across the boundaries of health professions disciplines in education, research, and service: the University of Washington experience.

The Institute of Medicine's vision for health professions education specifies working together across professions and schools to provide patient-centered care. Improvement in collaborative preparation of health professionals is seen as central to achieving substantial improvement in the quality of health care. In this article, the authors address one central question: How can medical schools work with other health-sciences schools to promote their educational, research, and service missions? The authors summarize the history of the University of Washington (UW) Health Sciences Center in promoting interprofessional collaboration in education, service and research; analyze the key strategic, structural, cultural and technical elements that have promoted success or served as barriers in the development of the UW Center for Health Sciences Interprofessional Education and Research; and suggest strategies that may be transferable to other institutions seeking to implement an interprofessional health sciences program.