A Good old country song!

I’ve often said the story of IAPAE sounds like the start of an old country song “It started in a bar in Tucson Arizona”.  The truth is it did.

In 2007 in the bar of the conference hotel for the annual PAEA conference a small group of friends sat and discussed how exciting the previous years had been with the proliferation of new PA programmes starting up, mainly in the UK, The Netherlands and Canada.

Myself, Nick Ross (Birmingham UK), David Fahringer (Kentucky USA), Rachel Detoro (was Catanzaro, Arcadia University USA) and David Kuhns (Maine USA) talked about the need for something akin to PAEA, but covering a global aspect. The longer we talked the more it was clear that if we wanted to do this, we would have to step up. The biggest question was how?

The President elect of PAEA was Dana Sayre-Stanhope, and a conversation about the evening before opened the flood gates, Dana knew exactly how we could do this, and soon mobilised the offices of PAEA, with the staff officer Jennifer Jarman soon on the case. Within a very short period, with a huge amount of work, the team had developed the International Forum for Physician Assistant Education (IFPAE), with its inaugural meeting to be hosted at the next PAEA conference in Savannah Georgia in 2008.