Medical Assistant
January 14th, 2007
I’m sure you’ve seen those commercials trying to entice people to become medical assistants. It’s a worthwhile pursuit, but you’d never know it by the commercials. The people they show as medical assistants would make me not want to become one.
Where do they get this people from anyway? When they speak on the commercials to encourage you to join the school that’s sponsoring the commercial, they’re lucky they can say their own names. It’s as if they’re saying, “I’m an idiot and I’m now a medical assistant, so you can become one, too.”
It reminds me of the TV show, “All in the Family.” Archie had a next door neighbor called Lionel Jefferson, who was a smart guy. But to humor Archie, when Archie asked him what he wanted to be, he would say, “A ‘Lectrical Engineer.” That’s what these people on the medical assistant commercials remind me of. “Look at me. I a medical assistant.”
What exactly does a medical assistant do anyway? According to the US Dept of Labor:
Medical assistants perform many administrative duties, including answering telephones, greeting patients, updating and filing patients’ medical records, filling out insurance forms, handling correspondence, scheduling appointments, arranging for hospital admission and laboratory services, and handling billing and bookkeeping.
The median annual salary for a medical assistant is about $25,000 and for a nurse it’s about $60,000, so nurses make more than twice that of medical assistants. So how is a medical assistant different than a nurse? Again, according to the US Dept of Labor:
Registered nurses (RNs)… perform basic duties that include treating patients, educating patients and the public about various medical conditions, and providing advice and emotional support to patients’ family members. RNs record patients’ medical histories and symptoms, help to perform diagnostic tests and analyze results, operate medical machinery, administer treatment and medications, and help with patient follow-up and rehabilitation.
It seems that medical assistants perform more administrative tasks than nurses do, so are medical assistants really doctors’ secretaries? If so, that’s great, but on the TV commercials they are not portrayed in a favorable light. They come off as being kind of dense. Knowing that someone got their training at the Chubb Institute doesn’t really inspire confidence. They need to make better commercials and portray medical assistants as competent people and not as people who got their training off the back of a matchbook cover.
