The Physician Assistant Studies Program at Brenau University has received continued accreditation from the Accreditation Review Commission on Education for the Physician Assistant.
The PA program is the newest degree in the Ivester College of Health Sciences. It was established in 2020 with initial accreditation, and the first cohort graduated in 2023.
“We are looking forward to better serving our program’s mission to helping the medically underserved and with a focus on behavioral health,” said Department Chair Julie Keena, DHSc, PA-C. Keena is the founding director of the program and is also a professor. “Our hope is that with the accreditation complete, we can bolster the expanding healthcare network in Northeast Georgia with quality physician assistants.”
The initial accreditation period, after which a program can begin admitting students and granting degrees, is required prior to earning continued accreditation. The process can take up to six years to complete, requires the submission of more than a hundred pages of application paperwork, and multiple site visits, according to Kyrus Patch, DHSc, PA-C, assistant program director.
“You have to collect a lot of data, and you have to prove to the accrediting body everything that you report,” Patch said. “We collected information on how students and faculty are performing, along with graduate scores on the certifying exam.”
All of Brenau’s PA faculty were involved in the process, including Cody Davis, MPAS, PA-C director of clinical education and assistant professor; Jerry Erickson, DMSc, PA-C, director of didactic education and associate professor, and Erica Parks, Ph.D., PA-C, who worked on analyzing the data collected for the application. The data took several years to collect, and Parks said they adjusted the program to better reflect the outcomes they wanted.
“The first two graduated cohorts had a pass rate of 100% for the Physician Assistant National Certifying Examination (PANCE) exam,” Parks said. “We also saw students early on who needed remediation needed fewer remediations later on, which means our interventions are working. Also, our preceptors repeatedly commented on how our students are more prepared and professional than students at other schools, some of which specifically seek out students from our program.”
Erickson said they worked as a team to earn the accreditation and develop the program to ensure positive outcomes for students.
“No matter what our other beliefs are as individual practitioners, coming together and respecting that while we are not the same, we all have an end goal to offer the highest quality education we can,” Erickson said.
With the final step in the provisional accreditation process completed and having achieved Accreditation-Continued, the faculty are now setting goals for future cohorts, including raising the goal for the program’s base passing score during the program, and reducing the attrition rate, which is currently at an average of two students per cohort.
“We try to get even our best students to be better, because that produces a good practitioner in the end,” Davis said.
Brenau’s program will not need to undergo another accreditation review until 2035.
