The Well
Hosted by Mount St. Mary’s University Physician Assistant Program leadership, The Well brings together clinicians, educators, and healthcare professionals to discuss and explore advancements in clinical practice, healthcare education, and the wide-ranging issues impacting the future of healthcare.
The Well
Experience in Practice with Elizabeth Donovan
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In this episode of The Well, Mary is joined by Elizabeth Donovan, a seasoned physician assistant and former president of the Maryland Academy of Physician Assistants, who brings more than 30 years of experience caring for patients and serving the PA profession.
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Well, a PA run podcast from a Mount St. Mary's University PA program. And if you've tuned in and heard us before, the Well is a source of insight, inspiration, and growth for current and future PAs. My name is Dr. Mary Jackson, and I'm honored to be the program director for the Mount St. Mary's PA program. I do not have my co-host with me, Dr. Leanne Hedges, our associate program director, who is out engaging with ARC PA at their conference. But today we're delighted to welcome Elizabeth Donovan, a dedicated clinician, educator, mentor, and leader whose career reflects a deep commitment to advancing the physician assistant profession. Elizabeth has practiced in general surgery for more than 30 years, caring for patients in both inpatient and outpatient settings. Over the past decade, she has also become a passionate mentor, providing clinical shadowing and healthcare experience opportunities for aspiring PAs while serving as a clinical preceptor for PA students. Her commitment to the profession extends far beyond the clinical setting. Elizabeth has served in numerous leadership roles with the Maryland Academy of Physician Assistants, including President, House of Delegates Representative, Former Political Action Committee Chair, and Founding Chair of the Student Affairs Committee, where she has championed initiatives supporting pre-PA and PA students throughout Maryland. So please join us in welcoming Elizabeth Donovan. Elizabeth, thank you for joining us.
SPEAKER_01Good morning, Mary. Thank you so much for having me. It's truly an honor.
SPEAKER_00It's our pleasure. So we, as a new PA program, have been so fortunate to have your support. You've joined us for educational opportunities, admissions, grading and exams like ASCII's and of course Cadaver Lab, which was just a huge love fest, if we can if we can call Cadaver Lab that. So as a longtime clinically practicing PA, why is it that you want to teach PA students now?
SPEAKER_01That is a great question. And it is one that I've thought a lot about for the last six years. Ever since I got really involved in the Maryland Academy, which was in 2020, I will say that precepting was probably the spark, right? Precepting filled my cup in so many ways. But I realized that if I was going to pursue PA education, that I was going to need a lot more structure and understand fully what does it really mean to be a PA educator, right? So I was introduced to the Physician Assistant Leadership and Learning Academy's Faculty Fellowship, which is housed in the University of Maryland's graduate studies programs. And I did really well and I enjoyed it so much. And I really have to give them a shout out, right, for a little bit of where I am today and this confidence that I have in pursuing teaching because they do a fantastic job of giving you the knowledge and the skills that you need to feel successful, I think, as a PA educator. So then you guys gave me my first chance to give a lecture. And I'll be honest with you, when I left the building that day, I was so energized. I was so excited. Like I just knew that this was the right thing for me. Even though, honestly, teaching is a different profession completely from being a clinician, right? So I knew it would be hard. I knew it would be something that would have a steep learning curve. But then I also realized that I could redirect my love of lifelong learning now to teaching the next generation of PAs. So I thought about it more and I thought about it more. And then I started to realize, wow, there's like this big shift going on, right? This sort of butterfly career moment where I've spent over 30 years practicing medicine. So satisfying, hugely successful on my end. But now what's emerging is this new knowing, right? This new knowing that I'm inspired for a deeper sense of professional purpose, which I think is teaching.
SPEAKER_00That's amazing. I love so much of what you said. We love Pala. Um, I've been we've been well supported by them, and they do great work in the community, certainly a leader. Um, I love what you said about I say the same thing too. Sometimes I drive home after an experience. We recently did a service experience with the students in Frederick and like a proud mama moment. Like they always tell me, like, oh, you inspire me to do these things, and I think you energize me to do my clinical job better, to come back here and teach with passion. So it is it's an amazing opportunity, and you're exactly right. I think a lot of PAs move into PA education and they think, oh, it's just like precepting at the bedside. It's a whole new career. It is a whole different career very rewarding. So, what excites you the most about teaching PA students?
SPEAKER_01Oh gosh, so many things. But you know, you mentioned it a little bit earlier in the intro. I think it's mentorship, you know. Um, what I've always loved about our profession, and I would love to know if this has been your experience as well, is that we support each other hands down all the time, right? There has never been a moment in my professional career where I couldn't reach out to a colleague and feel 100% supported. Because, you know, in some ways, we're a little bit of an underdog profession, right? It's like we're not always well represented. We're not always well supported because we sort of fall, right, between physicians and nurses. Um, but then what I realized about how I could translate that to teaching, right, is it's the perfect way to approach what's important to me from a teaching perspective, which is the development of professional identity, leadership, and advocacy, right? So, like, can we teach that longitudinally through their education and training? And and honestly, I learned very late in my career how important professional leadership and advocacy really is. It's honestly, in my opinion, just as important as advocating for our patients.
SPEAKER_00100%. And I think when I look back at my own PA education, I think during that time the emphasis was so much on medical knowledge, test taking, memorizing these things that now we have at our fingertips all the time that we didn't spend time in this space. And I appreciate that we get to do this now, like at the Mount's PA program, these are things that we talk about, things that we work on. These skills are just invaluable. And so I love that. And I've already seen you bring this to our program. So um, why a leadership and advocacy focus?
SPEAKER_01Well, I would say um, you know, being a PA is more than just the knowledge, right? And the skills that we have. Um, it's being a really thoughtful, responsible clinician. And so that leadership journey, it begins in the classroom. I'm I'm sorry, in the in the in the in the exam room, right? Because that's what we're teaching them to do. But we're also, you know, what I would like them to understand is that they need to advocate for their profession. Because guess what? If you're not advocating for for your profession in a changing healthcare environment, you won't necessarily be able to provide the care that you're being trained to provide. And when I was in my Pala Fellowship, we were each um tasked with an individual research project. And I chose leadership and advocacy and PA education. And I did a real, I did a really deep dive into it, and I realized the profession has core competencies, right, for graduating PAs, and leadership is literally one of them. But there really is no formal RPA requirement for teaching leadership, right, in a didactic curriculum outside of what occurs in the exam room. So I came to the conclusion in my research that this profession needs clinicians that can lead, advocate, and represent the PA role with clarity and integrity. And it would be my goal to teach them those skills, right? How to lead from the exam room to the boardroom.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Ah, I love it all. Um, I teach the professional practice part of our didactic year course series. And my journey when I graduated as a new PA, right, I don't even know if I joined my professional organizations right away. I was just busy working and trying to get my head around emergency medicine. And what I came to learn over time that I didn't pick up in PA school was wow, I'm only able to work at top of scope because there are so many individuals that have been advocating and fighting for me, for the profession behind the scenes. And so now I have the opportunity to have my cohort in front of me and say, What's the number one thing that you can do when you graduate to continue supporting this profession? It's join all of your professional memberships, right? You join AAPA, you join NAMBA or the state chapter that you're in, you join, like for us, the emergency medicine PA organization. And by doing those things, your dues, your numbers help support this work. And then when you're ready, what we're already talking to the students about is how do we write these letters, right? Of course, all of our organizations make it so easy, but how do you make your letter better? How do you go and talk with your representatives? What do those conversations look like? Or how do you write a letter to a company that says, ask your doctor to prescribe whatever it is, Ozempic? And you can write a letter to that company and say, how about ask your clinician or ask your provider, right? We need to start changing the way that America views the healthcare team because team-based medicine is here. It's proven to have better outcomes. And so we need to be promoting this publicly. So I love everything that you said because professional advocacy obviously starts in the in the um in the clinical room, but I think it starts in the program with us, and it's our responsibility to hand this to the next generation who's going to be carrying that torch eventually.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. And what you touched on a little bit there. Oh, sorry. No, go ahead. And what you touched on there a little bit is professional identity, right? It's like it's something we need to be really intentional about, treating it as a core skill, not an extra, right, in their education.
SPEAKER_00Right. So how do we how do we approach that? Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So first of all, keeping it a core skill, right? Weaving it longitudinally through the curriculum, just like you guys are doing such a good job of. Um, and help them to understand that yes, the opportunities to talk to a legislator or show up on Capitol Hill with the leadership and advocacy summit that AAPA hosts every year is scary. I get it. I've been there. You know, the first time I did it, thank God I was holding the hand of Deanna Nihara. I mean, it was just, it's scary. But at the same time, you know, deep inside, you need to be there, right? Like you're you're you're focused on this is an important thing, and I'm gonna try this, and I'm just gonna show up and be willing to listen and learn because you know how important it is, right? So it's a skill you have to practice. It's not it's not something innate, it's not something we're all really, really good at. But if you treat it almost like as a daily habit, right, um, then it becomes something more more comfortable. And you do it in the exam room, and then it grows, it grows over time, right? You can tackle things like barriers to care, you can uh tackle things like the constant changing healthcare environment and how do PAs fit into that? And also at the same time, you're protecting everything that you're working really hard for today, right? And PA school is the ideal time to learn that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's excellent. And there's so many, like when I think about leadership, there's so many different ways in which we are leaders. Um, but often what we want to tell our students is well, what can they want to hear, what can I do? What are the tangible, actionable items that I can do now as a student when I graduate?
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Well, shout out to you guys because you already just started the practice, right? The practice happened when you guys went to Frederick and did the Asian American Center Mini Clinic. I mean, that's amazing. That's how students can start the practice of advocating for not only the patient, the community, or some public health need, right? And you mentioned it before, staying connected after graduation. You really need to sort of internalize the importance of maintaining that, that state and federal, state and national PA organizational membership. Because not only are you helping in a financial way, right? Like you mentioned, that your dues support the activities that per you know that promote the profession, but also you're staying up to date and informed, right, about the issues that are current. Whether they're statewide issues or national issues, they're really important to your practice. Because I don't know if all students really truly understand, but the the regulations, the rules that govern the way we practice occur on a state level, right? They're they're founded in law, in the legal system. And that's why we focus uh within the Maryland Academy and our legislative committee on going to Annapolis and basically telling legislators what's up, like what are what's what are the pain points for PAs? How are we handicapped in order to be able to provide access to care that's so important? And they listen, you know, they want to hear from us, but we have to have the courage, right, to stand up and do that. For me personally, one of the things that I did later in my career, which was just an opportunity that just walked right in front of me, was I was sitting at a nurse's station at Sibley Hospital, and um the president of the medical staff walked up to me. And this is a physician that I had worked with many times before. He was a consultant on many of our patients, and he sat me down and he said, Elizabeth, he said, I we need a PA to represent PAs on the credentials committee because we're all physicians on this committee, and we're credentialing so many more PAs now than we ever have in the past. And we just truly don't understand the education and training of a PA, but we know you do. So would you be willing to be the first PA on this, a voting member on this credentials committee? And the answer was heck yes. I was scared to death, but the answer was heck, yeah, I will do it, right? Like I knew in my bones that I was, I had to do it, right? And so these are the opportunities where even though it's a little uncomfortable, if you just say yes and you just show up, you don't have to be uber knowledgeable about what's going on. You just have to sit and listen and learn. And then the moment will come, I promise you, where you will be able to contribute for sure. Those are some of the things you know that I would think of. And at MAPO, you know, we we're all volunteers, nobody gets paid, right, to do what we're doing for the profession and the PAs in the state of Maryland. So we need hands on deck, we need people to help. And to volunteer for a committee on a state or even on a national level is is wide open for as much or as little as you want to do, right? There's micro involvement, there's macro involvement, right? You could spend one hour a month just creating a social media post for your organization, and that's contributing, that's giving back, right? Um, so the other thing you that we mentioned was Leadership and Advocacy Summit, right? That is a structured, organized event that occurs every single year in Virginia with the with the intent of not only teaching practicing PAs and students about leadership and advocacy, but also in a structured way, walking down to Capitol Hill with you, holding your hand and saying, let's talk to these legislators and let them know why this particular bill is so important to PAs. So there are so many ways to get involved, which just brings me full circle to this whole, you know, thing that I've been struggling with for the last six years, which makes me realize this is definitely where I want to be. I want to be teaching this next generation. Thank you all for joining us so much. We'll see you next time on the well.