this happens in Germany. I know our healthcare systems are different but there are way more north American members on lemmy than German ones. I'm simply listening to points of view. What a physician assistant does is fairly the same in both countries.
As said, I'm a nurse working bedside and I don't plan to this sometimes sh*tjob for the rest of my life. I don't like dealing with my coworker's petty problems and their need to talk and criticize people behind their backs.
Reasons to study PA are I'm cerebral and prefer to read and learn than to talk, I like knowing my medicines and therapies, interpreting EKGs, explaining to patients what they should and shouldn't do, checking labor parameters to decide if we have to increase or decrease an antibiotic... I don't want to work bedside with a growing old, overweight and demented patient population (already punched twice and proposed to have sex 2 times as well). I don't want to be ridiculed by my coworkers each time I open a book to read about medicine simply because I want to know more.
Doctors where I am are usually mature coworkers. I don't mean all doctors are grown ups (they are not) but there are more grown ups among the doctors than among the nurses: nurses I work with love to talk about sex and tiktok and going to smoke whereas doctors usually talk about patients and therapies, at least most of them when I hear them.
Overall doctors seem to be less chatty with less drama and more professional, more grown up.
I know that as a PA I'm not a doctor and I'd only earn EUR 300 per month more than now as a nurse and I'm still thinking if it pays to study 3 years to earn just a bit more, not really much more but hopefully work with grown ups.
This is not something I'd pay myself but I'd have to find a hospital that offers a bachelor as a PA as a so called Duales Studium where you work 50% and study the other 50% but you still receive your normal salary, but for this I'd have to move 200 km south.
If you're a PA or plan to become one, am I being naive? Is there really less drama?
Do you regret it?
Well a BSN won't do bedside care unless they want to. They can, but part of the point of getting the degree is handling different aspects of nursing than just bedside care in a facility setting.
And, yeah, the "higher" you are in the chain of command, the less physical work is involved. Not that it disappears entirely, but even in a hospital, a PA here in the US is going to be able to call in nurses and nurse's assistants to do the demanding physical work unless it's an emergency where time is too big a factor, and even then they'd only get started.
Same with dementia patients too. You might have to provide care for them if you're in a facility that treats dementia, but you wouldn't do so alone.
I'm honestly amazed you don't have the equivalent of a nurse's assistant to help with moving patients though. That's what I did as my primary job, and we were the ones that an RN would call when a patient needed moving around, if they didn't want to or couldn't do it. I'd be responsible for anything from fifteen to thirty patients in nursing homes, so I know exactly what you mean about the ratio killing your body.
The job is part of why I'm disabled now, it is very much a young person's job, doing the grunt work of patient care.