Trish Kelly, PhD, PA-C

My Experience

• Worked as an Assistant Director in the national physician assistant accreditation office (ARC-PA)

• Previous ARC-PA Site Visitor

• Experience developing 2 new physician assistant programs and successfully navigating 5 accreditation applications/site visits

• Experience as a Department Chair/Program Director, Associate Director, and Academic Coordinator

• PhD in Educational Leadership in Higher Education

• 26 years of experience in higher education

• Participated on the Faculty Development Council for PAEA for six years

• Worked at a public academic medical center and at a private liberal arts institution

• Started initiatives like interprofessional education, cultural inclusion training, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), Service-learning Programs

• Developed a two-week new faculty on-boarding program

• Published journal articles and monographs on Generation Y students, interprofessional education, service-learning, cultural competency, and SoTL

• Provided national and international presentations on faculty retention, faculty recruitment, Generation Y students, interprofessional education, service-learning, cultural competency, accreditation, journal reflections and SoTL

• Served as a JPAE editor and reviewer

• Served on the ARC-PA Post Graduate Accreditation work group

• Facilitated the PAEA Medical Director 2 day workshop

• Served on many university committees including promotion and tenure, new faculty development, service-learning, interprofessional education

My Story

I’ve been asked what made me decide to start consulting. The reason is that I genuinely love physician assistant education and I really want to see educators succeed in what they are doing. It is such an important profession and I have the ability to give back to something that gave me so much.

Over the last few years I’ve seen the rapid growth of PA programs, and observed the effect it has had on program directors, faculty and accreditation. From my past experiences, several interests have evolved over the years. These interests are reflected in the sections of this website.

I have experience in developing new programs and continuously tried to be innovative with new initiatives to enable the programs to grow. I really enjoyed developing something that would make a difference and I was able to use my creativity to make it unique.

Faculty development surfaced from the sheer need to train and mentor new faculty entering the profession from the clinical environment. I experienced first-hand the challenges of faculty recruitment, faculty retention, and keeping seasoned faculty up with innovative educational practices.

My interest in team building transpired from discovering inventive ways of making the team collaborative, motivated and energized. Team building is critical for program growth and success, and watching the team come together is a very rewarding process.

Leadership development initially started with me obtaining a PhD in Educational Leadership in Higher Education, but really grew out of a desire to become a better leader and not just a manager. I believe to be an effective program director you must learn from your mistakes and continually sharpen your leadership skills. Leadership is about people, and helping them grow and succeed. Becoming a leader is a conscious choice and takes practice.

The last two sections of the website involve accreditation and data analysis. Like most program directors I understood that accreditation was about quality assurance, but it was difficult to keep up with and many times hard to comprehend. As a former assistant director for the ARC-PA, I now have a greater understanding of the standards, the accreditation process, and the daily struggles that programs have with accreditation.

As a PD, I also understood the importance of self-assessment and worked to develop a very comprehensive self-assessment process for the program. Even though the process was rewarding to see how the results could be used for program improvement, it was very labor intensive and took a toll on both the faculty and myself.

As an ARC-PA assistant director I observed the struggles that programs had with self-assessment and especially in the area of data analysis. Programs have difficulty enough just keeping up with day-to-day operations of the program, and data analysis only adds to the frustration. That is why we are offering a data analysis service. Hopefully, our service will alleviate some of the stress and workload for programs.

After 26 years in higher education, being a department chair/program director, and working as an ARC-PA assistant director, I have the experience to help others with the challenges I faced in the past. I really want to assist PA programs with services to make their jobs and lives a little easier, and to put my passion and creativity to good use. I am excited to share my experience in PA education with you. I can’t imagine a better mission than to empower program directors and faculty, to grow as individuals and leaders in our profession.