About the Journal

SteadFAST: Case Reports in PA Studies, an open-access journal, was developed in partnership with UNT Health Fort Worth’s College of Health Professions and UNT Health Open Press and provides students enrolled in the Physician Assistant Studies program the opportunity to publish case reports written as part of the program curriculum. SteadFAST provides real-world, experience-based, informative patient care examples that can influence future studies, research, and clinical practice in an open-access publication that allows free and immediate availability to a global audience.

SteadFAST: Case Reports in PA Studies is named in honor of Dr. Eugene A. Stead, who was a physician and innovator in many areas of health care and healthcare delivery. Dr. Stead is credited as the founder of the PA profession after graduating the first class of PAs in 1967. As more physicians began to specialize rather than remain in general practice after WW2, Dr. Stead recognized the need to increase the number of providers to meet a growing patient population. Building on the experience and training of Naval Corpsmen (advanced-trained medics) who had recently left the service, he designed a program in the early 1960s to advance their medical knowledge toward the physician level. Initially dubbed “assistants to physicians”, the nascent program graduated the first three physician assistants in 1967. Since that time, PAs have been at the forefront of medical care provision across nearly every specialty and in many areas of leadership.

Published annually, SteadFAST content includes:
Case reports

SteadFAST articles and full journal issue downloads are provided on its website and via Scholar@UNT Health, where archival issues and new content are available. The website also features instructions for authors, open access and copyright information, editorial review board information, and platform submission access.

Journal Scope:

SteadFAST: Case Reports in PA Studies is an online, open-access publication of peer-reviewed medical case reports written by Master’s of Physician Assistant Studies program students at UNT Health. These reports provide medical and educational value to the global medical community.

Journal information

Publication model:

SteadFAST: Case Reports in PA Studies is an open access journal where all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author by permission of the stated license.

Publishing formats:
SteadFAST is published in electronic format only.

Publication frequency:
Annually in February

Launch date:
February 2025

Peer Review model:
SteadFAST operates under a double peer review model.

Digital archive:
SteadFAST is archived in Scholar@UNT Health, the scholarly repository of The University of Nort Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth. Scholar@UNT Health is managed and maintained by Gibson D. Lewis Library.

Unique article identifiers:
All articles published in SteadFAST are assigned a DOI through CrossRef.

Licensing:
SteadFAST articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license 4.0 License (CC BY-NC https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

Publication fee

Currently, UNT Health PA students are not charged any submission or article processing charges (APCs).