Educating Adolescent Patients

Abstract

One of the things that attracted me to the PA profession was the extent to which physician assistants are involved in education. PAs educate their patients, communities, colleagues, and students. Creating new, effective ways to accomplish this is an ongoing challenge for the PA educator. One of the more challenging groups PAs work with are adolescents. Adolescents are less likely to visit the doctor’s office than those in younger age groups and more hesitant to share information about their lifestyles or to ask questions of a provider they may not know well.1 The Child Health Associate/Physician Assistant Program (CHA/PA) at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center (UCHSC) in Aurora, Colorado, is a 3-year primary care program with an emphasis in pediatrics. The first two years of the program are primarily didactic; the students are involved in clinic one day a week. The third year of the program consists entirely of clinical rotations, and each student is required to take at least one clinical rotation dealing with adolescents. A PA colleague at the program is responsible for coordinating the pediatric didactic curriculum during the second year of the students’ training, while I direct the PA Role Development (PARD) course, which is also offered during this timeframe. She and I are working together, as part of a HRSA grant, to promote community awareness of the PA profession and to interest our students in educating the adolescent population. In an attempt to more fully understand what adolescents wanted to learn, my colleague visited several high schools in and around the Denver area and conducted focus group sessions. She met with students in rural, underserved, and urban areas to learn the topics on which they wanted more information.2 Several topics of interest were generated from these discussions (see Table 1), and my task was to devise a way to help our PA students deliver the information to the teens. As course director for the PARD class—and one who has a strong interest in service learning and community involvement—I felt my course was the most obvious one to facilitate our students’ involvement in educating teens. PARD emphasizes the importance of community involvement, and students are typically asked to complete a community project. Presenting topics that teens determined to be of the most interest to them was a community project that could serve several purposes: generating an interest among PA students in educating a specific population within the community, preparing students to give future presentations to their colleagues, and increasing teens’ awareness of another type of health care provider. This project would also allow for the development of a library of portable, easy-to-use presentations that could be given by faculty, students, or other members of the PA community. The topics generated by community teens were posted for the second-year CHA/PA students enrolled in PARD. The class consisted of 31 students, ranging in age from 22 to 32, with a variety of life experiences before entering the program. The students were asked to choose one topic from the list and then to self-select groups of three or four students with whom to work. Each group was assigned the task of designing a presentation on its chosen topic. The style of the presentation was left to the discretion of each group. The groups were