Guide · pre-PA
Patient care hours for CASPA: what counts
The line between patient care and healthcare experience, the nine categories CASPA sorts your life into, and how to log hours so application week is a copy-paste.
Patient care hours are the number PA programs weigh most heavily, and they are also the number applicants most often have to reconstruct from memory in June. The categories below come from CASPA's own applicant help center; the categories are CASPA's, but how strictly each program reads them is the program's call.
What counts as patient care experience?
CASPA's definition is short: experiences in which you are directly responsible for a patient's care. The test is responsibility, not proximity. Being in the room does not count; delivering care does. Roles that usually land here:
- EMT and paramedic
- CNA and patient care technician
- Medical assistant, when the role includes hands-on duties like vitals and injections
- Phlebotomist
- Nurse, respiratory therapist, dental hygienist
Programs are allowed to be stricter than CASPA. Some publish their own list of accepted roles, some set a minimum number of hours, and a few count roles that CASPA files under healthcare experience. Build your school list first, then track against the strictest definition on it.
Patient care experience vs healthcare experience
Healthcare experience is paid or unpaid work in a health-related field where you are not directly responsible for a patient's care. You can spend an entire shift surrounded by patients and still be in this category. Scribing, front desk and registration work, most hospital volunteering, and clinical research without hands-on duties usually belong here.
Two rules make this section harder than it looks:
- The same hour cannot be both. One hour goes in one category, never two.
- One job can span both. If your role mixed hands-on care with clerical work, CASPA has you enter the position in both sections and divide the hours between them. That split is impossible to reconstruct fairly a year later, which is the real argument for logging by category from day one.
The nine CASPA experience categories
Every entry lands in one of these, so knowing them early stops you from lumping everything into one pile:
| Category | What goes here |
|---|---|
| Patient care experience | Roles where you are directly responsible for a patient's care |
| Healthcare experience | Health-field work, paid or unpaid, without that direct responsibility |
| Shadowing | Officially observing a health care professional at work |
| Volunteer | Volunteer work outside the healthcare field |
| Research | Work on a research project, ideally beyond regular coursework |
| Teaching experience | Roles where you instructed others, tutoring and TA work |
| Leadership experience | Roles where you held a leadership position in an organization |
| Extracurricular activities | Activities you want programs to see, academic clubs and similar |
| Non-healthcare employment | Paid work outside healthcare and outside a research lab |
How CASPA actually wants the hours
This is where a shoebox of totals falls apart. For each experience CASPA asks for the organization, your title, start and end dates, whether it is ongoing, a description of your responsibilities, a supervisor's contact details, and whether you authorize programs to contact that supervisor. And the hours are not entered as one lump sum: you enter the average weekly hours you completed across the date range.
So a single grand total is the wrong shape of record. What the form needs is hours attached to dates, per role, per category, plus a supervisor you can still reach. Log those four things as you go and the section fills itself in.
Do breaks count as patient care hours?
No. Count hours actually worked in the role, not scheduled shift length. An unpaid meal break inside a twelve-hour shift is not patient care. It is a small overstatement, which is exactly the kind that is uncomfortable to defend if a program asks you to walk through a number.
Does CASPA verify patient care hours?
CASPA does not audit what you enter. It does collect a supervisor's contact details for every experience and ask whether programs may contact them, so verification is at each program's discretion rather than never. Nobody checks until the moment it matters most, and by then your supervisor may have moved on. That gap is why Hourcrest exists: hours signed by the supervisor who was there, sealed as you go, exportable in CASPA's categories when the cycle opens.
Want the manual version now? The free Excel template has the CASPA categories, per-experience totals, and a supervisor contacts tab already built in.