With all of our advancements in modern medicine we are able to diagnose and treat more illnesses and conditions than ever before. Because there are more patients, there is also an increasing demand for qualified and experienced professionals in the field of medical science. There is a great breadth of jobs available in this industry, and not all of them require a medical degree of 4 or more years. We’ll go over a few of them in this article.
Medical Lab Assistant: Ever wanted to study DNA?
Medical labs deal with a wide variety of different things, from blood and other sample testing to studying how viruses behave. You’ve probably seen those ads for Ancestry DNA where you can send in a cheek swab and find out what your heritage is (incidentally if you want to try it don’t pay full price, check out CouponJournal.org for membership coupons, and yes those are processed in a medical lab as well. There are a lot of different jobs available in medical labs, and a lot of them don’t require more training than what you would be able to get at a community college.
Medical Director
The primary duty of a medical director is to coordinate as well as oversee the working of the department’s staff members, train the interns and provide proper guidance as and when required, maintain effective communication and good relationships between the various departments of the medical organization, and so on. It’s a very broad job that requires that you wear many hats, but the most important things are to have good communication and organizational skills and to like working with people.
Clinic Managers
Clinic managers are responsible for assisting the trainees or the interns, updating the records of the patients who are admitted from time to time, managing different types of office work like medical billing, monitoring the level of inventory, and so on, and keeping all of the important documents organized. He or she is also responsible for ensuring that all the employees of the organization abide by the organization’s rules and regulations. Moreover, a clinic manager should also maintain a good relationship with the insurance companies. It’s mostly an administrative job, but a very important one.
Medical Assistants
A medical assistant has to perform both administrative and clinical duties. The administrative duties of medical assistants include maintaining medical records, answering phone calls, setting appointments with doctors, greeting patients, completing the insurance forms, and so on. On the other hand, the clinical duties of medical assistants include gathering the medical history of patients, preparing laboratory specimens, throwing away used materials, sanitizing different types of medical equipments, collecting blood samples, performing some general laboratory examinations, talking with the patients about the treatment that they are undergoing, and so on. A medical assistant may also clean the examination and waiting rooms. This job is definitely more hands-on with the patients, but not as involved as being a doctor or a nurse. Depending on the clinic you may need some training in phlebotomy, which is typically a short program available at most local colleges.
Which Position is Right for You?
If you are interested in helping people, almost any job in the medical field will be quite satisfying. It may come down to what your level of education is, and what additional training you are willing/able to do. Lots of jobs do not require a bachelors or masters degree, and lots of community colleges have programs that run from a weeks to a couple of years in length. With the projected job growth rate in the medical field, it’s definitely worth investing some time in to getting a certificate or associate’s degree.