Media discourse on physician assistant nurses in South Korea: a text network and topic modeling approach

This study quantitatively examined the portrayal of physician assistant (PA) nurses in Korean media by integrating text network analysis with latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling.

A total of 3,564 news articles published by nine major Korean media outlets between 2020 and 2024 were analyzed. Content analysis was conducted using term frequency-inverse document frequency calculations, network centrality analysis, and LDA topic modeling to extract key terms, map discourse structures, and identify latent topics.

The analysis identified four primary topics in Korean media discourse: "healthcare workforce expansion policies" (30.4%), "hospital clinical practice and operational management" (23.5%), "institutionalization of the PA nursing role" (17.8%), and "COVID-19 response and public health crisis management" (28.3%). High-centrality keywords included "hospital," "medical," "patient," "physician," "government," and "nurse," indicating that the discourse primarily focused on clinical settings. Topic modeling revealed a major shift from pandemic-centered coverage in 2020 to a focus on healthcare workforce policy and PA nurse institutionalization in 2024, coinciding with the passage of the Nursing Act.

This study provides empirical evidence suggesting that the portrayal of PA nurses in Korean media discourse evolved from a peripheral regulatory issue to a central healthcare delivery solution, particularly in the contexts of workforce management, clinical practice, and crisis response. Our findings suggest that PA nurse institutionalization received broader attention when positioned as part of systemic healthcare improvements addressing concrete clinical needs. These results offer valuable insights for policymakers and administrators in framing and implementing workforce policy reforms.