What exactly does a medical assistant/ekg/x-ray person do?

Question

I am thinking about going back to school to get into the medical field. I have never worked in the medical field so several people tell me to try being a medical assistant first, is it worth it? Instead of an LVN or an RN?

Answer 1

Just off the cuff, medical assistants work in doctors offices or hospitals and 'assist' the dr and office in running smoothly. The medical assistant, depending upon training and the position, may draw blood (phlebotomy), take an ekg (electrocardiogram) to check a person's heart waves using an ekg machine, make dr's appointments for patients to be seen, collect urine specimen to be sent out for urinalysis, and perhaps handling patient billing matters.

LVN is a licensed vocational (or practical) nurse that has about a year's training at a vocational-technical school. They don't do as many tasks as the RN (registered nurse) and don't have as many responsibilities as the LVN/LPN, however, I have heard that the LVN/LPN course is quite rigorous and it's not as easy as it may sound. An RN has at least an associate's degree (generally 2 years but may be longer for nursing) in nursing and can actually start patient IV's (intravenous) and have more opportunities as far as administrative and management positions. Though with more responsibility comes more stress. X-ray or radiology is a department where they take pictures of patient's inside generally to look at the bones. A radiographer or x-ray technician generally has an associate's degree from a community college like the RN but not sure about job availability for x-ray tech's.

There there is a program such as medical office assistant or medical office 'specialist' where one doesn't really get hands-on clinical training such as phlebotomy or ekg but perhaps learns reception, medical transcription, medical billing and office management. I'm not sure, however, about job placement even though between you, me and the wall, any school will say that most if not all of the graduates have found jobs :) If I were you though, I would check out the local vocational-technical schools as opposed to those $15,000 private schools in which the student winds up paying back the loans forever ;)

Answer 2

being a medical asst. is a great job as long as long as the dr or drs you work for are kind and good to staff. iI would pursue the Rn degree with that you can pretty much write your own ticket especially if you specialize. I was a medical asst, its alot of work and the dr I worked from was the doc from Hell! It can be a great job and the pay varies from dr to dr usually in the 9 to 12 dollar an hour range where an rn can make as much as 35 dollars an hour