General topic:

Adequacy of PTA education in relation to clinical need

Problem:

There is currently controversy as to whether or not the education of the PTA needs to move to the Bachelors level in an effort to minimize the gap between the PTA's education and the PT's education as evidenced by the move to the DPT.

Research questions:

Is the current associates level of education sufficient to produce adequately prepared PTAs?

Does the current associates level of education for the PTA provide adequate time to gain the knowledge and clinical experience needed in the set 2 year or less time?

Has the education of the PTA kept up with the current clinical requirements of the PTA?

Are graduating AAS PTAs staying current with physical therapy practice and theory?

  
Background:

-PTAs must maintain an appropriate education level in order to appropriately assist the physical therapist who is moving to the doctoral level.

-PTAs have a massive amount of information to learn in less than 2 years at the associates level.

-PTAs must be readily available to care for the ever increasing needs of the physical therapy patients.

-Medicare is currently considering scaled payment for physical therapy depending on if services are provided by at physical therapist versus a physical therapist assistant.

-Tricare is currently not reimbursing for treatments rendered by a physical therapist assistant.

Purpose:

The purpose of this study was to determine if there is a need to move the education of the PTA from an associate’s level to a bachelor’s level to maintain public health safety and optimal care, to minimize the gap between the educational training of the evolving DPT and the current 2 year degreed PTA, and to allow for more academic time to complete an already intense coursework that would allow for a more in depth training and comprehensive clinical experience.

Hypothesis:
The community and the profession of physical therapy would be better served by moving the education of the PTA to the bachelors level to minimize the gap between the education of the PTA and the PT, provide for better appropriation of PTA course content (already squeezing in so much in about 67 hours secondary to third party constraints while maintaining minimal PTA competencies and resultant brevity of vast topic information), and to better service the community.
 
Rationale/theory:

Significance:

-The education of the PTA is important in order to assure PTAs are properly trained to treat physical therapy patients according to a physical therapists evaluation and treatment goals in a safe efficient and effective manner.

-Analyzing the appropriate level of education would allow for sufficient didactic and clinical learning thereby producing a maximally prepared PTA.

-If the education of the PTA does not keep up with current and future trends of physical therapy practice, the PTA will not be able to properly assist the physical therapist in patient care.  This could potentially cause the profession of the PTA to be rendered extinct.  If the PTA becomes extinct, the field of physical therapy would loose a tremendous amount of professional that provide physical therapy care.

-If PTAs were eliminated from the already insufficient number of trained professionals available to provided skilled physical therapy, the growing population of aging baby boomers would only magnify the shortage.

-This would render an exponential amount of aging baby boomers and others without proper physical therapy rehabilitative care causing the potential for greater numbers and greater severity of disabled citizens further burdening our nations fragile health care system.

Variables:

Current preparedness of PTAs

Current PTA school CAPTE requirements

Current minimum level for PTAs per APTA

Current higher education constraints regarding course hours at AAS level

Resources:

CAPTE

PTA schools

PTs

PTAs

Higher education-government

Medicare website

Tricare website

APTA

APTA statement on introduction of DPT

Subjects:

N/A

Methods:

Qualitative design

Survey of APTA members (limitation)

Survey of PTA educators

Survey of clinical managers