Student Skills

Assessing MA Student Skills

Along with the responsibility of training and supervising their medical assistants, the medical assistant's employer must also take on responsibility for adequate quality control when assigning tasks, especially in the back office's clinical areas.

Different Avenues To Learn The Job

The path to success begins with your education and training. Formal training in a medical assisting program is NOT always required. There still are many employers, usually physicians with their own private practice, who prefer to train their medical assistants according to their specific needs right in their own office. 

Whether trained via a vocational training program, trade school, community college, or under the direct supervision of a doctor, it is important to make sure the medical assistant student is directly engaged, receives clinical supervision, and expert instruction to reach proficiency. The student medical assistant's role and responsibilities must be clearly communicated, and performance should be periodically assessed to assure, they will handle their duties well and stay within their scope of practice once they are in the field.

What Do Doctors Want?

Most well versed Medical assistants know what the doctors want. They have learned it over the years on the job. However, new graduates very likely don't. The externship site would be a great place to start teaching them at least some of these values before they graduate, even if it was just one or two.

Perhaps doctors who accept externship MAs should have a clear outline as to what they want their MAs to learn, and convey this to their office managers, and other staff. I have heard from many student MAs, who were placed in an office, and were expected to work right along the staff, without much feedback, and instructions. Some stated, they were desperately looking to fit in, but did not receive the guidance that would have pointed them in the direction they needed to go.

Unfortunately, many student MAs on externship are regarded as free help, rather than students. Indeed, they can be free help, but it should be a WIN-WIN situation for everybody, not just the office. So, some of the responsibilities also falls on the medical office staff, and doctors at the externship site.

• What Do Doctors Want?
  
  A practicing physician on our Medical Assistant community forum tells us: What Doctors Want - And Medical Assistant Schools Don't Know!