Is A Physician Assistant Considered A “Good” Job?

A job role that’s continuously overlooked within the healthcare sector is a physician assistant. Many individuals believe it’s a slow-burning, bad-paying, and wasteful role. However, they couldn’t be further wrong. 

According to U.S.News, the best role in healthcare is currently a physician assistant, which is more favorable than a nurse practitioner, physicians themselves, and orthodontists. But why would this be considered the “best” job in healthcare? To understand why it’s been nominated, see the below reasons. 

Why is a physician assistant job so good?

For those reading, some might be shocked by the nominee of best healthcare roles. But there’s excellent reasoning for this selection. Here’s what you need to know: 

Salary 

First, let’s discuss salary because it plays a significant role in everybody’s lives. Although almost all individuals working in the healthcare sector don’t consider this a main priority, as they love taking care of people. It does provide a comfortable living for yourself and your loved ones. 

Currently, those with a master’s degree earn around $71,000 annually. But, physician assistants are way above this, with a median salary of $109,820 every year. Additionally, choosing your work location can translate into a good quality of life. Almost every PA job role comes with extra benefits such as medical, retirement plans, education allowances, vacations, yearly bonuses, and much more. 

Flexible hours 

Including the above, the main reason that everybody is choosing to enroll within a PA lifestyle is because of its immense work-life balance. Across all specialties in the healthcare sector, it’s rare to talk about work-like balance positively. However, a PA role is much different. Don’t get us wrong; some PA jobs will require you to work long hours, limiting your freedom. But, others provide you the flexibility to work part-time and around the globe.  

Learning 

Additionally, physician assistants obtain a much deeper understanding of the medical industry. Everyone in the sector makes life-changing medical decisions, ranging from the desk staff to the medical directors. But PAs are allowed to sit peer-to-peer with patients and help with team decisions that could dramatically impact somebody’s life. 

By having this level of responsibility and the highly driven team around them, their knowledge within the industry can expand rapidly. Because of this, PAs tend to receive remarkable job satisfaction knowing they’re making a change to our world. 

Longevity 

As time passes, robots and AI is becoming increasingly alarming to many people’s jobs. After all, developing these machines will eliminate human error, making them much more reliable. Although they’re creating robots and special AI machines that’ll improve the healthcare sector, we’re a long way from it being an issue for hierarchy specialists. But this doesn’t mean it’ll never happen. 

After developing some research, we quickly found that a PAs role will unlikely be replaced by robots or some type of AI software. Because of this, the longevity of the job itself is highly rewarding, making the learning process much more valuable.