Development of the European Physician Assistant/Associate Collaboration and the First EuroPA-C Conference

The Royal College of Physicians in the United Kingdom is a 500-year-old institution. It is now home to the Faculty of Physician Associates old societies, new ideas. The conceptions around physician assistant (PA) education and practice emerging from Europe are fresh and innovative. Creating new health care providers in systems that can sometimes be arcane, hierarchical, and bureaucratically overloaded requires out-of-The-box thinking and disruptive actions. Watching how these countries develop PAs and how they overcome obstacles to education and practice can inform PA thinking everywhere. The Netherlands has already achieved professional independence for PAs only 20 years after their creation. The EuroPA-C is a European continental collaboration that has been many years in the making. It has set for itself a goal of unifying PAs and overcoming barriers such as diverse languages, policies, and health systems to find common ground. This article illustrates how the European continent is well positioned to become a new vanguard in PA development.