Did you know that physician assistants (PAs) go back to the mid 1960’s? The return of medically trained and skilled Navy corpsmen during the Vietnam-war era coincided with a U.S. shortage of primary care physicians – especially in rural areas – and PAs began practicing alongside physicians. The 1967 graduating class of the original PA program at Duke University had four corpsmen, and in 1968, the American Academy of Physician Assistants (AAPA) was founded.
