What is the U.S. Public Health Services Commission Corps and do PAs have a role?
A. Most people don’t know that the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps is one of the seven unformed services along with the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It was started in 1798 by John Adams, our second president and was called originally the Merchant Marine Health Service, the first health insurance program to provide comprehensive health care for all the merchant sailors. Today, the Commission Corps has officers assigned in every agency in the federal government to provide health and human service support. Our job then, is we have the responsibility to maintain readiness to be able to deploy and respond to any health crisis in an emergency, be it a hurricane or ice storm or earthquake. As a commissioned officer, the expectations are very high and there is a whole range of things that our officers are doing. PAs are working across that whole spectrum. We have PAs who are doing research at NIH, we
