Rushing W A, Miles D L
Med Care. 1977 Dec;15(12):1004-13. doi: 10.1097/00005650-197712000-00004.
A focus on health care delivery systems and the emergence of New Health Practitioners, particularly Physicians' Assistants (PAs), represents one of the more significant nonbiomedical developments in American medicine since World War II. Much discussion about PAs revolves around the kinds of illnesses they are qualified to treat which then permits physicians to concentrate on patients with other types of illnesses. Ignored in this focus on illness characteristics is the possibility that physicians and PAs may treat patients with different social characteristics. That issue is the topic of this paper. Differences between the status characteristics of physician and PA patients are reported for a rural community where PAs and physicians work side by side in the same offices. The relationships observed in this rural community suggest that the higher a patient's socioeconomic status, the more likely (s)he is to be treated by the physician.
对医疗保健提供系统以及新的医疗从业者尤其是医师助理（PAs）的出现的关注，是自第二次世界大战以来美国医学中较为重要的非生物医学发展之一。关于医师助理的诸多讨论都围绕着他们有资格治疗的疾病种类展开，这使得医生能够专注于患有其他类型疾病的患者。在对疾病特征的这种关注中，被忽视的是医生和医师助理可能治疗具有不同社会特征患者的可能性。这个问题就是本文的主题。本文报告了在一个农村社区中医师和医师助理患者的地位特征差异，在这个农村社区中，医师助理和医生在同一办公室并肩工作。在这个农村社区观察到的关系表明，患者的社会经济地位越高，就越有可能由医生治疗。
