USC faculty member is the first Black woman elected president of the California Physician Assistant Board

Sonya Earley, EdD, PA-C, clinical associate professor of medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, has been elected president of the California Physician Assistant Board. She will assume the office on January 1, 2024.

The California Physician Assistant Board’s primary mission is to license physician assistants, investigate complaints against physician assistants, and discipline those who violate the laws and regulations that pertain to physician assistants in California.

“The overarching goal of the board is to protect consumers by making sure the physician assistants are properly educated and trained and that they live up to the high standards expected of physician assistants in California,” said Earley, who has been on the California Physician Assistant Board since 2013.

Physician assistants are clinicians who practice medicine in every specialty and setting and are supervised by medical doctors. California has one of the largest numbers of practicing physician assistants in the nation and that number is expected to grow as the state continues to experience a shortage of primary care providers.

“Physician assistants fill a critical role in the practice of medicine in the 21^st century,” said Earley, who is a practicing physician assistant at Kaiser Permanente-Orange County. “PAs are helping to improve access to health care, particularly in places that have typically been underserved, such as rural areas and inner cities.”

Diversity is important

As president of the California Physician Assistant Board, Earley hopes to use her office to raise the profile of the profession in California and influence more young people of color, particularly young Black people, to become physician assistants.

Earley, who has conducted scholarly research on the numbers of young Black people who pursue careers as physician assistants, said that the number of young Black students entering the profession lags behind other groups. While Black people make up about 13% percent of the U.S. population, only about three percent of students graduating from physician assistant programs in the U.S. are Black.

One issue, noted Earley, is that several historically Black colleges and universities as well as several community colleges shuttered their physician assistant programs in recent years. Some of these schools, including Charles R. Drew University, have resurrected their programs, but those closures resulted in fewer Black physician assistants in the U.S., said Earley.

Earley’s research also uncovered that young Black people are not introduced to the profession early in life. Many learned about the physician assistant profession after they had already declared a major in college and were either unable to pivot to pursue that career path, or their matriculation timeline would have been negatively impacted by a change of their major, increasing their financial burden.

One of her goals is to get the word out to young Black people about the profession so that they may decide to become physician assistants early in their academic careers. When she is not teaching the students at the Keck School of Medicine, she devotes some of her time to talking to students at local colleges and high schools about what a physician assistant is and how to become one.

“It is a great profession and I believe that having more young Black people pursue this career will not just diversify the profession, it will ultimately make it a better one for both patients and other PAs,” said Earley, adding that, as with other medical professions, diversity has been shown to improve the quality of care.