Medical Assistant Career

What can I expect from a medical assistant career?

Medical assistant careers are full of all the excitement and challenge you’d expect from an entry-level career in medicine. This is a job that will allow you full clinical exposure and face-to-face contact with patients. The overwhelming majority of medical assistant careers begin in physician’s offices, but these medical professionals will also find career opportunities in both private and public hospitals, as well as in the offices of practitioners of more specialized forms of medicine including ophthalmologists, chiropractors, optometrists, and podiatrists.

In all these settings medical assistants will be called upon to perform administrative duties that might include facilitating doctor-patient correspondence, bookkeeping, scheduling appointments, and greeting patients. The clinical portion of a medical assistant

career will involve the collection of laboratory specimens, sterilization of medical instruments, transcription of patient information, blood draws, and administering medicine, amongst many other clinical duties.

What are the job prospects like for graduates entering medical assistant careers?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has recently released a publication showing projected growth of 34% over the next eight years in this profession. That means the number of actively employed medical assistants in America will increase by nearly 200,000. Medical assistant schools have expanded their facilities and medical assistant training departments to ensure the highest quality education as they’ve ramped up enrollment in recent years.

The need right now for well-trained medical assistants is so great that even with this massive wave of fresh job candidates, recent graduates can expect jobs to be available to them without a tremendous amount of competition. In fact, job prospects for graduates of medical assistant programs have been described as “excellent” in a recent BLS publication.

Still, this is a somewhat technical medical profession that involves dealing directly with the public; so proper training is key to a successful medical assistant career. A good education will allow you to secure work easily as the demand for well-trained medical assistants is tremendous. This increased demand in recent years has been driven by primary care group practices and clinics where supporting staff is being called on more and more to handle both clinical and administrative responsibilities.

How are schools preparing students for medical assistant careers?

Medical assistant schools are meeting the demands of the job market by providing fully comprehensive training programs. This is done with the knowledge that with a solid educational foundation, the sheer number of newly trained medical assistants entering the profession in the next ten years could skew upward the overall level of knowledge and professionalism amongst medical assistant new-hires. This works to the benefit of employers in the medical community, as they will find a better-educated graduate of medical assistant programs needs less on-the-job training and is better able to handle an increased level of responsibility and technical difficulty. Also, when graduates begin their medical assistant careers with a base of solid technical training the patient is assured top quality attention.

All these factors contribute to a projected decrease in cost to the heavily burdened American medical system as physicians are able to delegate more tasks to medical assistants while leaving themselves more available to help where their level of expertise is needed. It is expected that over the course of the next several years a greater number of well-trained practitioners beginning medical assistant careers, in conjunction with other variables, has the potential to reduce the cost of healthcare for the average American.