Back in the 1980s, not long after she graduated college, Perry Morgan went to go visit her

two-year-old nephew who was sick in the hospital.

The rest of the family was dying to get out of there, and I found myself actually kind

of not wanting to leave.

There was a piece of me that said, I can't do this.

I have the personality type to do this, and this is what I want to do.

Perry had grown up on a farm in rural North Carolina.

She was part of the first generation of her family to even go to college.

The idea of working in healthcare was appealing, and also overwhelming.

I was having a hard time getting my head around four years of medical school in a long

residency, and somebody told me about the PA profession.

PA stands for Physician Assistant, although as Perry will explain later, it won't for

long.

Anyway, odds are, at some point, you or a loved one has been or will be seen by a PA in

a medical setting.

In 2021, there were more than 158,000 physician assistants practicing in the U.S., an increase

of more than 6.5% from just the year before.

But back when Perry was starting her career, things were different.

I've a little embarrassed from my students who worked for years now to get into PA school

to say that I learned about the profession in February, and I enrolled in August of

the same year.

The PA profession was established in the 1960s, around the same time as its sort of sibling

...