From the Statehouse to the Classroom: How Legislative Advocacy Is Reshaping PA Education

Erin E. Chalmers, DMSc, MSPAS, PA-C

Nobody warned me in PA school that I'd one day be sitting in a legislative hallway, waiting to testify, rehearsing talking points about workforce data between patients I'd seen that morning. That's not in the curriculum. But maybe it should be.

Kentucky's SB116 cleared both chambers this year — a win that took years of showing up, building relationships, and making the case that PA scope-of-practice modernization isn't a turf battle. It's a patient access issue. That work didn't happen because the legislature suddenly came around. It happened because PAs — including PA educators — were in the room. Repeatedly. That presence is not accidental, and it doesn't happen without a particular kind of professional development that our field is still learning to prioritize.

We've Been Sitting This One Out

Let's be honest: the PA profession has spent decades producing excellent clinicians who mostly stayed out of policy. Not because they didn't care, but because nobody asked them to engage, and the structure of PA practice doesn't exactly leave a lot of time for advocacy work. You finish a twelve-hour shift, and you go home. Legislative session is someone else's job.

The problem is that scope-of-practice language, reimbursement structures, and workforce deployment models don't write themselves. Someone is always at that table. For most of our profession's history, it wasn't us. HRSA projects significant primary care physician shortages running through 2037-2038, with PAs consistently named as a critical part of the solution. Being named in a report and actually having a hand in shaping the policy response are two very different things.

What Doctoral Education Actually Does

When I went back for my doctoral degree, I wasn't expecting it to change how I thought about my role in the profession. I thought I was sharpening clinical and educational skills. What I got — and what I see in our students — is something harder to name but more valuable: a shift in how you understand the system you're operating inside of. You start to see the levers.

A look across doctoral PA programs nationally reveals that the best ones aren't just producing credentialed practitioners. They're producing people who can walk into a legislative hearing with workforce data, translate clinical outcomes into policy language, and hold their own in conversations with hospital administrators, health system leaders, and lawmakers. That skill set doesn't emerge from a master's-level clinical training. It's built deliberately, at the doctoral level, and it's what the profession needs more of right now.

The Classroom and the Statehouse Are the Same Conversation

Here's what I tell my students: the curriculum you're learning isn't neutral. Every competency you develop, every patient you treat, and every outcome you document is an argument for what this profession is capable of. When you graduate, you become part of the evidence base. How you practice, where you practice, and whether you engage in your professional community — all of it matters beyond your individual career.

Doctoral education makes that argument explicit. It asks PAs to zoom out, to understand the workforce data, to engage with policy, to lead. And when doctoral-trained PAs carry that orientation into their state associations, into legislative hearings, into academic leadership roles — you start to see what a profession that governs its own future actually looks like.

A Profession at a Pivot Point

SB116 is one data point. Across the country, states are revisiting PA practice acts, telehealth regulations, and workforce deployment frameworks. Some of those conversations will go well for the profession. Some won't. The difference often comes down to who showed up and how prepared they were.

ADPA members are not passive observers of this moment. We are — or we should be — its architects. The combination of clinical credibility, educational experience, and doctoral-level systems thinking is exactly what's missing from most policy tables. The bridge between the classroom and the statehouse has always been there. We just need to decide to cross it.