What a mid-level practitioner could be called (and the prestige it conveyed) was a (sometimes heated) topic of conversation back in the 1980s. It was raised during the Med A Occupational Analysis (OA) that we did in the late 80s. Some were at the time wanting to compare the training and employment of 6Bs to US military PAs.
While I had a larger involvement in the HCA OA that was being done at the same time, I did have occasion to provide a brief report comparing the training of CF Med As with USN Hospital Corpsmen (HMs) including their Independent Duty Corpsmen (IDCs). It came about as we were in the planning/design of the "new" CFMSS. In one of my trips down south, I visited their Naval School of Health Sciences in San Diego and spent time observing the HM "A School" and the IDC courses that they were running at the time. I had an opportunity to chat with the IDC students during coffee breaks and they were bitching about "PAs" even before they had moved on to their version of "phase 2". Their biggest complaint was that they would be going to sea (or to a FMF unit) after training, with limited opportunity for clinical experience, while PAs were employed (at least in the USN at the time) almost exclusively at shore based hospitals and clinics mostly providing care to dependents and retirees. And of course, PAs, as Warrant Officers (as they still were in the late 1980s) were paid more for what these IDCs in training thought was the same skill.
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