Land a Job as a surgical medical assistant

Today on CapYear cast, we speak with Deanna Codling, Director of the Department of Surgery at Lifebridge Health in Baltimore. She shares her perspective on the role of a medical assistant in the Department of Surgery, how to leverage the position to advance your career goals as a prehealth student, and how to land the job. Thanks for listening & subscribe for updates! Graduates (& soon to be graduates) - Get clinical experience and a paycheck! Create your FREE profile on https://capyear.co/ to find employers looking to hire pre-health graduates and current students. Plus, you can find a growing number of clinical research positions. Applying to Medical or PA school? CapYear offers application support and career advice from physicians, PAs, and nurses to launch your career and make your application for MD/PA school stand out from the crowd. Providers - CapYear saves time and money by proactively sourcing applicants for your positions from a pool of diverse, college-educated talent looking for clinical positions to launch their careers. The future PAs, nurses, and physicians of America can fill many entry-level clinical positions, support your team and help deliver a great patient experience. Visit our job board, post a job, and let our team get to work for you today! https://jobs.capyear.co/ For more information on gap year placement, medical assistant hiring, or MD/PA school application support, please email us at [e-mail] https://capyear.co/ https://jobs.capyear.co/ Transcript:  Hi, everyone, and welcome to the next edition of the CapYear Cast. My name is R. T. Arnold, and with us today is Deanna Codling, Director of the Department of Surgery of LifeBridge Health here in Baltimore. Deanna, welcome to the CapYear Cast. Thanks for having me. You have been a great advocate of hiring pre health students into clinical positions. Most of the people who listen to our podcast are either pre health students or advisors. And we'd love to start a little bit by understanding in the department of surgery, what are the roles that pre health students tend to play? So I have to start by just saying, what we do in a Department of Surgery and ambulatory setting. So 1 role in our department is not touching just 1 item. So our candidates that come through our department have an opportunity to do multiple things that can range from scheduling an appointment and taking the patient back doing the basic vital signs. It can go on to doing education with a patient because we have a lot of education pathways for our patients prior to surgery. It could also mean going on the back end and calling patients after surgery and having a conversation with them. You end up doing a little bit of patient navigation, a little bit of clerical work, and then you have these wonderful one on one relationships with the providers that allow you to really adjust what you do to their nuances, and so they have a lot of opportunity in that regard. Can you tell us a little bit more about that sort of the one on one relationship that starts to get established with the providers Sure so all of our M. A. S. or M. A. A. S. will work with usually a subset of providers. So whether that is our general surgeons with some of the specialists that go with that that specialty. So we have thoracic surgery and colorectal surgery. So you were working directly with that doc. You may be doing their intake of new patients. And so you have to make sure you get those records. And so they're going to be working with you back and forth and saying, Hey, did you get, for instance, a colonoscopy result? Okay. I did, but did you make sure you got. the last two because of whatever. So you get to have that one on one interaction with your docs and a lot of times when you show interest they'll tell you why. Why is that important to seeing a new patient and understanding what's going on with them and their diagnosis and sequelae. So it sounds like there's a lot of opportunity to learn from the physicians directly in the in your department. You take the opportunity. Everything is about initiative here. Everything is about initiative. It's being given an opportunity to have that interaction and then you taking the step to take the initiative to ask for it. Nobody's going to force you to do any of those things, but the opportunity is definitely there. And if you want to take it, it's there for you. And what about with the patients? What's the typical sort of involvement or engagement that pre health students that you've hired have with the patients? So I've seen some great interactions with our pre health students and our patients. One being that they just, they kind of understand some of what's going on with the patient because of the studies that they've done in the past. So when a patient calls with a complaint and they need to just know, is this bad enough for me to go to the ER or not, instead of just saying, go to the ER, I don't have ...