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Open Your Clinic Doors to Medical Assisting Externs
As a practicing medical assistant, do you promote student externships? There are many benefits of supporting your local medical assisting program by welcoming their graduating students into your office.
If you need to hire a new MA, this is a way for you to spend time with prospective employees in unpaid work experience, orienting them to your clinic, merging them into your team, and getting to know them before offering a position. Even if you aren’t hiring, you are giving the gift of your professional expertise, contributing to the education of future medical assistants, and building networking channels with your local medical assisting program for future hiring needs.
Contact your local medical assisting program and offer to take an extern. Be prepared to give the program director or externship coordinator an idea of what types of experiences, both clinical and clerical, your office can offer a student. Let the director know a bit about your office: whether it is large or small, what specialties are covered, and some sense of the “chemistry” in your office setting. The best externship coordination will match your particular needs with the individual student. The best personality match will ensure a successful experience for both your staff and the student.
Never be afraid to ask for specific considerations, such as a part-time extern or an abbreviated externship. My program requires six weeks of full-time externship, but I am very willing to offer a clinic three weeks if the clinic prefers a shorter time with the students. Quite often the clinic will choose to extend the externship to the full six weeks once they get to know the student. Some clinics might want to try two separate students, three weeks each, so they can choose the best fit as a future employee. My program requires at least three weeks with a family practice or pediatric clinic, and the other three weeks may be spent with a surgical or other specialty clinic of their choice. This allows the students to experience two types of clinics and gives them a broader experience for their future employment choices.
There are some precautions you should take when negotiating an externship experience in your clinic. You should work with only nationally accredited medical assisting programs (CAAHEP preferred, ABHES accepted). The accreditation ensures that the program has trained and educated the students to a standard that is approved by a rigorous process through the national organization. Nationally accredited program graduates are the only medical assistants who may sit for the national certification examination for the CMA credential.
It is also advisable to make sure students carry liability insurance, are CPR/First Aid certified, have their Seven Hours of AIDS Education certificates, and are up-to-date with immunizations and TB tests.
Discuss any concerns you have with the externship coordinator, such as what to do if students do not fit in; if their skills are not adequate; if they arrive late, leave early, or are absent; or if their behavior is not professional. Most medical assisting programs will want you to expect the same professional behavior and work ethics from your externing students as you do from your employees.
Your externs should almost immediately be able to take height, weight, and vital signs and do simple rooming of patients. You can then gradually move them into more complex tasks, such as completing patient intakes, administering injections, performing tests on patients, and triaging phone calls.
What do externing students expect of you? When surveyed, my students say that they want to feel like they are accepted into the team, that they are contributing somewhat to the office flow, and that they are successfully performing their duties. They expect to be corrected, taught, and advised; and they thrive on positive feedback. They appreciate having one person to guide them, a mentor they can go to with questions, and having an idea of where they will be stationed each day so they can prepare well. Communication seems to be key to their success.
The bottom line is that the extern should be a benefit to your office, and not a hindrance. Even though it takes energy and patience on the part of your staff, welcoming externs should provide benefits that far outweigh the staff’s efforts. Thank you for helping us teach the future medical assistants of America!
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