> Newsletter

> Articles Index

Summary of Board Actions and Issues

The NCCPA Board of Directors met on May 29, 2002 in Boston. The following summary describes actions taken and issues addressed at that meeting.

For more than two years, NCCPA’s Board and committees have been discussing ways to clarify and strengthen eligibility requirements for the initial certification exam to maintain the close and vital link between graduation from an accredited PA program and certification. At its May meeting, the Board clarified that for PA graduates to be deemed to have graduated from an ARC-PA accredited program, their PA educational program must have been accredited at the time of their matriculation. That new policy will apply to students who matriculate on or after January 1, 2003.

Secondly, the Board reconsidered NCCPA’s policy of awarding lifetime eligibility for PANCE with no limitations on the number of opportunities one has to pass the exam. Again, in the interest of strengthening the eligibility requirements for PANCE, the Board approved the following new policy: Individuals who are deemed eligible to take PANCE for initial certification on or after January 1, 2003, will maintain that initial eligibility for six years after completing the requirements for graduation from an accredited physician assistant program. Further, those individuals may take PANCE up to six times in that six-year period.

Finally, as NCCPA moves towards offering PANCE year-round, in the interest of exam security it is important to put some safeguards in place to limit the number of times an individual may take the exam in a short period of time. Therefore, the Board determined that effective for all PANCE examinees beginning in January 2003, individuals will be limited to the number of times they may take PANCE to one time in any single 90-day period or three times in a calendar year, whichever is fewer.

PAs whose certification lapses may regain it by passing the initial certification exam or a recertification exam. However, in order to be eligible for the recertification exam, they must have been earning CME hours during the period of certification lapse. At its May meeting, the Board approved two policy revisions to clarify those requirements:

• PAs who fail to pass the recertification exam as required to maintain certification by the end of a six-year certification maintenance cycle must review the period in which CME hours and Elective Component points (for the Pathway II recertification exam) were earned. Any CME hours or Elective Component points older than six years must be replaced with items meeting the six-year requirement for the new exam window.
• PAs who have been certified for less than six years and who are less than six years from their initial certification will be required to earn and log the number of hours that are proportionate to the time lapsed since certification. That is, if a PA lost certification after his first or second two-year certification maintenance cycle, he must only earn and log 100 or 200 hours, respectively.

The Board also spent time discussing the following issues:

• NCCPA’s plans to begin randomly selecting PAs for CME auditing as they complete the 2000-2002 CME logging cycle;
• The process by which PA directors at large will be selected to serve a second term;
• Ongoing exploration of the future development of NCCPA’s recertification process.

NCCPA committees and task forces are scheduled to meet on September 27-29, 2002 in Atlanta. The Board of Directors is scheduled to meet in San Antonio, Texas on November 16-17, 2002.

webmaster • (678) 417-8100
12000 Findley Road Suite 200 • Duluth, GA 30097-1409