This course provides students the opportunity to learn by teaching, as they assist the course instructor in facilitating student learning.

This course provides physician assistant students with an introduction to the PA profession. The course encompasses historical origins and early educational models. The course covers various professional entities; licensure, certification, accreditation, professional organizations, and medical ethics.

This course introduces the PA student to the most clinically relevant diagnostic imaging modalities, emphasizing the risks and benefits of different modalities, as well as the appropriate indications for obtaining a variety of radiographic studies. The student will be exposed to the most common plain radiographic diagnoses likely to be encountered in clinical practice as well as important life threatening diagnoses. At the conclusion of this course, the student will have foundational skills and competency to interpret plain radiographs demonstrating these important diagnoses.

This is the second in the sequence of Clinical Medicine courses. The course will present the physician assistant student with the necessary knowledge to understand the patient within a clinical context. A body systems approach is utilized in this course to study diseases of the cardiovascular, selected endocrine topics, renal, men's health, heme/oncology, pulmonary, and nervous systems. Principles of preventive medicine will be woven throughout the curriculum.

This is the final course in the Clinical Medicine sequence of courses and is designed to complete the introduction to human disease. The format will be primarily a population-based approach to presenting disease. The unique diseases and developmental issues encountered in pediatrics, geriatrics, and women’s health will be addressed. An introduction to the important medical issues relevant to caring for surgical patients will be presented. Psychiatric illness, geriatrics, musculoskeletal and rheumatology will be presented. Special topics of trauma, burns, and emergency medicine will complete the course. The principles of preventive medicine will continue to be integrated throughout the curriculum.

This course is the introduction to professionalism, professional behaviors for the PA, and behavior science for the PA student. We will explore stereotypes and providers’ inappropriate (or lack of) knowledge and how this might influence access to care. The focus is non-somatic medical skills and knowledge needed to become a clinician who manages these issues with insight into human behavior. Topics will include issues related to age, socioeconomic status, cultural, racial, religious, ethnic and family diversity etc. We will seek out and develop tools to recognize facets (including risk factors for and signs/symptoms) of the above issues and of abuse issues. Setting this foundation in basic psychopathology and its relationship to understanding human illness is core to the PA student’s developing professionalism.

This course builds upon the foundation developed during the professional didactic phase of the physician assistant program. Drawing upon this foundation, students will analyze simple and complex case-based patient scenarios. Working individually and in groups, and using computer-assisted patient simulators when possible, the students will be asked to gather data from physical examination, and EKG and laboratory data. Based on the data gathered, the student will recommend further diagnostic evaluations, suggest appropriate treatment, and develop follow-up plans based on the scenario presented. The development of thorough and relevant differential diagnoses for each case study will be an integral part of this process. The case studies will be drawn from a broad variety of clinical disciplines. In addition, students will be required to work in small groups to develop their own "teaching case" and will lead the remainder of the class through a learning exercise based on the case they have created.

This is the first of a two-course sequence which will provide the physician assistant student with opportunities to prepare a formal graduate capstone project/paper. Projects may be in the form of: clinical practice essay, PA curriculum development, medically-related community service project, in-depth medical case review, meta-analysis of specific disease / syndrome, or original medical research. This capstone project/paper will build on clinical training and enable students to build skills for life-long learning as problem solvers and critical evaluators of medical and scientific literature.

This course will provide the physician assistant student with continued preparation of a formal graduate project for the PA Program. Projects may be in the form of: clinical practice essay, PA curriculum development, medically-related community service project, in-depth medical case review, meta-analysis of specific disease/syndrome, or original medical research. This course will culminate with the completion of the capstone project/paper which is founded in clinical experience and enables students to build skills for life-long learning as problem solvers and critical evaluators of medical and scientific literature.