This week, the new program director and medical director will begin working to create Elon’s future physicians assistants program coming to Charlotte. The program has a tentative launch date of January 2027 and will be Elon’s second PA program — with its first program currently operating on Elon’s main campus.
This program will be a two year graduate program with 12 months of didactics — classroom instruction — and 12 months of clinicals — real world experience in the medical field. Elon’s current PA program functions the same way, but the two programs will have different curriculums.
Right now, Elon’s PA program located in Elon, sees between 2,000 and 3,000 applicants for 36 slots, according to Maha Lund, dean of the school of health sciences. This is part of what made leadership at the school interested in starting a second program. One of the program’s priorities is to ensure that PA students are integrated into the Charlotte community — through more than just their clinical rotations, Lund said. There are over 300 PA programs nationally, and Charlotte is the biggest city in the country to not have a PA program.
“We want to see what organizations are out there that we can partner with to help our students learn about Charlotte and the needs in the Charlotte area,” Lund said.
Currently, the Elon campus works to emphasize community interactions and partnerships as well, Kim Stokes, program director for PA department, said. Last week, State Senator Amy Galey visited the PA program and met with faculty and student leaders about Galey’s role on the healthcare Senate committee. Students were able to share their own thoughts on healthcare systems, emphasizing the program’s focus on committee advocacy, Stokes said.
Students also volunteer weekly with the Open Door Clinic of Alamance County, whose mission is to provide free comprehensive health care services for uninsured and under-served residents in the county. Students have also attended events at the Dream Center, an organization focused on serving a diverse community within Alamance County with programs such as English literacy classes and Columbian performing arts events.
The events PA students have attended emphasized how to better provide care and wellness for patients with a greater cultural understanding, such as conversations around healthy eating for patients with diabetes while allowing for diets that are within one’s culture, Stokes said.
“We try to make sure that our students have a handle on how to recognize themselves in the profession, how to recognize themselves as a leader, and that they have leadership responsibilities as a health care provider that extend even beyond the walls of the hospital or the health system they may work,” Stokes said.
Program director Dr. Veronica Marciano is excited to be joining Elon’s staff this week and to begin this PA program specifically in Charlotte.
“There's such a need there in that community,” Marciano said. “It's a great opportunity for Elon and for just PA education itself.”
Marciano said a main priority for her is to find community partners in Charlotte such as food banks, children’s hospitals and women’s clinics. One curriculum priority for Marciano is also to integrate teaching clinical medicine early on, in order to best serve the community.
“I believe as well, and just from my prior experience, that producing really skilled emergency medicine and urgent care clinicians also help to bridge the gap as far as health care access,” Marciano said. “My hope is to get out there and really kind of explore what Charlotte's needs are, and focus on the community needs.”
Dr. Timothy Lietz, medical director of the program, said he is excited about the opportunity to increase Elon’s name recognition in Charlotte and bring more educated medical professionals to the area.
The program will be housed in the same building as Elon’s flex law program in Charlotte and Elon’s sports management program in Charlotte, utilizing the same space during the day where law classes will take place at night. There will also be specialized equipment for labs for the students for their didactics.
Lietz said the first steps to creating a PA program will be to hire faculty, create a curriculum and figure out what the clinical rotations will be. Lietz said he will be working with Marciano to start this program.
While this program will have a separate curriculum from the one on Elon’s campus, Lund said she hopes the two programs will interact. On a faculty level, she said she could see sharing guest lecturers or collaborating on topics different faculty members have more knowledge in between the programs.
Another possible avenue for collaboration is to have programming such as a PA Olympics, where students can compete — but also focus on working together. An important aspect of this idea is that Lund said she would not want to see the two programs competing against each other but rather have members of each program split up to integrate the two schools.
“Something that is really important in PA education is that we educate students to work in medical teams,” Lund said. “They are not fighting against others, but they’re team players, and so I would hope that we can reinforce that by interactions between the two programs.”