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Postgraduate physician assistant (PA) programs designed to train individuals for the workplace have existed since the advent of the profession itself. These residency programs continue to grow in number despite the lack of outcome data supporting improvements in PA learning, effects on career development, or improved patient care. Leadership bodies of the PA profession in the US have been at odds regarding the meaning and ramification of postgraduate programs on specialty credentialing, accreditation standards, insurance reimbursement, and employment. Using Bourdieu's cultural conflict theory as a framework, we analyze the issues confronting postgraduate PA training programs. Our paper discusses implications related to shifts in power amongst the different stakeholders concluding that, although formal postgraduate PA training can be beneficial to both the PA and the medicine, considerations related to underlying agendas need attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of interprofessional practice (IPP) within healthcare appears to be fraught with difficulties, despite the attention it has received in the literature. Although there are examples where IPP has reaped significant benefits, it has also been shown to impede team performance. We demonstrate that a key cause of failure in IPP can be attributed to interprofessional conflicts based on threats to professional identity, and provide insight into how professional identity faultlines have the potential to be activated and conflict induced when there is differential treatment of professional groups, different values between professions, assimilation, insult or humiliating action and simple contact within the team. This has significant implications for the management of interprofessional healthcare teams and provides information for team leaders and health managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]