Taking it all in
Jaclyn Rohan, MPAS ’11, helps create a space for physician assistants in Ireland
Jaclyn Rohan, MPAS, graduated from the University of Florida College of Medicine in 2011.
Courtesy of Jaclyn Rohan
Oct. 7, 2025 — Just five years after graduating from the University of Florida College of Medicine School of Physician Assistant Studies, Jaclyn Rohan, MPAS ’11, journeyed to Dublin to help establish Ireland’s first physician assistant program.
She had visited Ireland the year before and fell in love. After some digging, she discovered the Irish government was starting a pilot program bringing PAs from the United Kingdom and the United States to work in hospitals and introduce the profession to the country.
Rohan had been working in breast and general surgery in Orlando for almost three years, and it just so happened that the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland was looking for a PA in those specialties. She took the job and set off across the ocean for a yearlong adventure.
“It was an incredible experience,” Rohan said. “And PAs are now a fully recognized position in the Irish medical system.”
Rohan performing a procedure in an operating room, just one of the several PA functions she showcased in her time abroad.
Courtesy of Jaclyn Rohan
Introducing a new system
It wasn’t an easy undertaking, Rohan said. Or quick. People who had been working in a system without PAs for decades were hesitant to introduce them to their team. Rohan said she thinks acceptance was slow going because the doctors, nurses and other providers hadn’t seen the positive impact PAs have on the system and in creating continuity of care.
PAs can do it all: assist in the operating room, see patients in the clinic, make treatment recommendations, prescribe medications, perform procedures and more. They’re valuable assets to hospitals and practices across the U.S. — and now in Ireland, too.
At least two of the Irish surgeons Rohan worked with looked to add PAs to their practice after the pilot program, she said. Even one of the most hesitant surgeons throughout the program invited her to join his practice at the end of her time abroad, which she said showed her the team was able to demonstrate just how important the profession is.
“It was incredible not only to show those in another country what I do as a PA, but also have the opportunity to not live in a silo,” Rohan said. “I saw firsthand how another country’s medical and insurance models work; I was able to see how somewhere other than where I live and breathe operates.”
Rohan now works in plastic surgery in Washington, D.C., after helping to start a Level II trauma program in the city back in 2020.
Rohan with PA students she helped train at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin through the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.
Courtesy of Jaclyn Rohan
Journeying into health care
This wasn’t her first foray into international medicine, though. When Rohan was completing her undergraduate degree at UF, she traveled to Costa Rica and Panama to serve populations with fewer health resources.
Rohan didn’t always know she wanted to go into medicine — none of her family members are in the medical field, and she started at UF as an English major. She had always been good at science and loved anatomy and biology, but she thought she would be a writer or an editor after graduation.
Then she switched her major to biology and started to shadow PAs, who all shared how much they loved their jobs. And that was it: Rohan was determined to be a PA.
Her first class at the UF College of Medicine was in a cadaver lab, where she learned anatomy principles she still uses when working with patients. She said she remembers her rotations, labs and classes and how they prepared her for her career. Being side-by-side with doctors and medical students in her training made her comfortable in multidisciplinary settings, like the one she was in during her time in Ireland.
Rohan sporting Gator gear in Ireland.
Courtesy of Jaclyn Rohan
She said she remembers one professor most clearly: Wayne Bottom, M.P.H., PA-C. Bottom, the School of PA Studies’ longest-serving director from 1982-2009, taught a class on communicating with patients.
“’Why this? Why now?’ That was his tagline,” Rohan said. “Keep an open-ended conversation with patients. Don’t be surprised if all these lessons you learn all come back 10, 15, 20 or 30 years later.”
That’s Rohan’s biggest piece of advice to current PA students at UF: Take it all in. Guidance from professors and lessons learned in class still inform how Rohan speaks to, interacts with and treats patients.
“It’s all going to come back,” she said. “Try to absorb everything you can.”
