You might want to look into a health assistant career. The pay and perks are good with median annual salaries ranging from $20,600 for entry-level assistants to $33,050 for experienced professionals. Of course, the salary will depend on the work experience, skills level and geographical location of the medical assistant positions. For example, general medical and surgical hospitals pay their medical assistants as much as $29,720 annually while offices of health practitioners will provide a decent salary of $25,240 per year.
Furthermore, individuals applying for health assistant jobs have important roles to play in providing excellent medical care for patients. Your duties will vary from one office to the next but you can expect to perform a variety of clinical and administrative tasks intended to keep the clinic or the hospital running as smoothly as possible. Plus, you also get to directly interact with the patients.
If you are attracted to the abovementioned pay and perks of medical assistant jobs, then you must meet their requirements. You need not worry about spending years and years getting a degree, fortunately, since medical assistants are only required to take a 1-2 certification course but that's getting ahead of the story.
Education
To get a head start in a health assistant career, you may take high school courses focusing on math and sciences since these will be very useful during the post-secondary programs. You can avail of said programs in vocational-technical schools as well as in community and junior colleges. Ask around from family and friends as well as individuals holding medical assistant positions for possible schools and colleges for this purpose. Of course, you must possess a high school diploma or its equivalent before you can enroll in these courses.
Your choices in an educational program include either a 1-year certification program or a 2-year associate degree program. Both provide for courses covering the subjects of physiology, anatomy and medical terminology for the clinical side as well as keyboard typing, recordkeeping, insurance processing and basic accounting for the administrative side of health assistant jobs.
In line with these subjects, you will learn clinical procedures, laboratory techniques, medicine administration and first aid in addition to office practices, medical ethics and patient relations. Ultimately, you should be ready for the challenges that medical assistant employment inevitably brings so much so that you can intelligibly understand the physicians, nurses and pharmacists as these professionals discuss a patient's case.
Training
You may also take the on-the-training route toward a career as a medical assistant. In this case, you will work alongside more experienced medical assistants and other health professionals in clinical or hospital settings. Again, a high school diploma or its equivalent is a minimum requirement.
Although a certification is not required, it will give an edge when looking for medical assistant jobs. This is because the certification indicates that the applicant meets certain qualification standards in terms of knowledge, skills and abilities. You may acquire your certification from associations like the American Association of Medical Assistants and the Association of Medical Technologists, either of which provides a certification based on a specialization like podiatry or ophthalmology.
If you have prior training in other areas of the healthcare industry such as volunteer work in hospitals, your resume will be twice as attractive to employers offering medical assistant positions. Indeed, actual work experience is often the barometer of success in a health assistant career.
Once you have the qualifications for health assistant jobs, you should strive to impress the employers with your personal and professional qualities. Aside from your professional skills, you must also be able to deal with different kinds of people, carry out medical instructions with little supervision and learn new things as you go along. You never know if you can parlay your work experience as a medical assistant into other professions like nursing.
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