Physician Assistant

Physician assistants, or PAs, work under a doctor’s supervision to meet patients’ day-to-day medical needs—physical exams, diagnoses, treatments, and counseling on preventive health care among them. To qualify for this medical career (which in most cases carries prescription-writing authority), PAs can choose from a wide variety of accredited educational programs offering master’s degree and bachelor’s degree programs.

In the NHSC’s underserved communities, PAs are challenged to apply their comprehensive medical knowledge, as doctors can be few and far between.With patients relying on them for the priority health care needs that in other regions might be the sole responsibility of staff doctors, PAs are exposed to an enviable array of medical issues.

Barry Linehan, PA-C
Helping Others Gave Him What the Big Bucks Couldn’t

At 40 years old, Barry Linehan had travelled a self-described "long and twisted road" in his career, from Air Force medic to health educator to lay missioner (an unordained spiritual counselor) in South Korea to a businessman in a Fortune 500 telecommunications company. He found, in his Fortune 500 job, that making the megabucks couldn’t begin to measure up to the feeling of success he used to get in the health arena.

Returning to his roots in health and medicine, Linehan became a certified PA, or PA-C, with Albany Area Primary Health Care in Georgia, and rediscovered the fulfillment he had taken for granted the first time around. Among the dedicated staff Linehan feels honored to work with is medical director Jim Hotz, MD, the real-life "Doc Hollywood" who gave up his big-city practice to settle down in a small southern town whose people needed him.

We asked Linehan about the NHSC:

What difference has the NHSC made in your community?
Our seven clinics serve 22,000 patients—some of them among the urban poor who live and work in the city of Albany; and others, served by our outlying clinics, who without us would have to travel 30 to 60 minutes to see a doctor. Our clinics hire a lot of NHSC people, doctors as well as PAs. They’re high-caliber professionals with a vision similar to mine—working to help the underserved, not just paying back their loans.

We get the job done here—we give people who would otherwise not have access to health care the high-quality care they would be lucky to get if they did have health insurance. I’m able to really talk with people at almost every visit and get on them about problems like tobacco abuse, physical inactivity, and depression. I see the huge impact when they make changes in their lives—they’re feeling better, and they’re excited about it.

What difference has the NHSC made in your professional life?
With the debt you incur going to PA school, it’s a really strong pull to follow the money trail after you finish. But the NHSC freed me up to do what I wanted—to provide primary care in an underserved community—without having to basically mortgage one of my children to have a house and family life.

Without the NHSC obligation, you might go to a place you thought would offer you a better overall lifestyle, and then you’d never be exposed to a diamond in the rough like this. Here, there’s a small-town feel—it’s a nice place to raise kids, without all of the crowding and the crime—and in terms of my practice, I get a lot more responsibility across a broader scope of challenges. I have the opportunity to address everything from A to Z—from somebody with a laceration or a burn to somebody having a heart attack who has to be transported to a local hospital.