Amid doctor shortage, NPs and PAs seemed like a fix. Data’s in: Nope

Wonder what the gender breakdown is for NP/PA vs. doctor, especially in that neck of the woods. And if it's pronounced, wonder if that has any influence on their ability to influence patience behaviour. As we know, MS is a hotbed of modern, unbiased activity...

They seemed surprised by some of those results, and I hope they continue to dig into it.

They cite "double-digit differences in flu and pneumococcal vaccination rates". I wonder if perhaps patients don't respond to NPs and PAs who say "you need a vaccine", but will accept it from a doctor. Perhaps the solution isn't to ensure access to a doctor, but find other ways to get patients to trust the non-doctor providers.

I'm sure there are a lot of confounding factors, making that difficult. And they surely don't need Some Guy On The Internet pointing them out. But I hope they look into them, rather than just naively concluding that PAs and NPs can't do a lot of jobs for which they should be qualified.