The Driscoll Dispatch

Week 15 in the Iowa Senate was exceptionally busy as we made major strides towards completing the agenda for the year. The Senate passed legislation regarding several important priorities for Iowans.

We remained in Monday’s debate until the morning hours of Tuesday — 5 a.m. to be exact! I went home and took a quick nap to be back to the Capitol on Tuesday for our final Agriculture committee meeting at 9:30 a.m. In this meeting the Agriculture Committee voted to move the governor’s appointee, Sterling Meyer, to the floor for his consideration on the Iowa Board of Veterinary Medicine. This was our final Agriculture Committee meeting of this session. I am so grateful to have been Chair of the Agriculture Committee this year, as agriculture is important not only to my family, but to Iowans, and citizens across the whole nation. The Agriculture Committee had a very successful and productive year and I can’t wait to see what we do as a committee next year.

I am also very excited that on Thursday, HF 424, the physician assistant (PA) bill was a bill that I ran on the floor and was passed out of the Senate. Iowa communities are facing serious healthcare provider shortages and HF 424 ensures health care systems have the necessary choice and flexibility to meet the needs of Iowans.

This bill eliminates the requirement that physician assistants have a specific relationship with a physician in order to practice. It also stipulates that physician assistants are legally responsible for the care they provide. The bill improves team-based care, collaboration, and flexibility by allowing health care teams and their employers to decide how to structure teams to best meet patients’ needs, instead of being required to follow a one-size-fits-all approach.

There were concerns raised about independently-owned PA clinics, so we added an amendment to require physician assistants practicing in an independent, PA-owned clinic to be supervised for two years. The amendment also requires the Board of Medicine and the Physician Assistant Board jointly adopt rules that determine the terms of collaboration between an independent PA and other physicians or health care providers after the two-year supervisory period has ended.