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Medical Assistant

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Medical Assistant — earning a living series

You may want to review the earlier post at http://www.preparesurvivethrive.us/emt-v-cna/

We have already discussed CNA v EMT for entry level healthcare providers. There is another ‘entry level’ provider that is relatively new on the scene – new as in the last 20 years. That 3rd person is known as a ‘Medical Assistant”. A medical assistant typically has about a years worth of training in such things as office management, coding and billing, some lab and x-ray experience, phlebotomy and injections and medical records creation and maintenance. One school that I know of which trains Medical Assistants charges $30,000.00 USD per student for the year. That does not include living expenses.

Typical jobs are in doctor’s offices which would include doc in a box situations and in hospitals as a unit secretary, medical records tech, billing office and maybe the lab. There are jobs as a free standing coder / biller or as a medical transcription person.

Overall the training is good and well rounded for the intended purpose. MA is also a good job as far as it goes and it does help in your understanding of things so that you can progress up the food chain ladder if you want to.

The down side of MA school / jobs is that it takes a long time to be able to earn money going this route, a whole year [or more depending on if you go to school full time or part time] v CNA where you can start earning in as little as 3 weeks. Once again $30,000.00 is a rather high price to pay for the school.

Several friends have gone though the school and then found out that the area was over saturated with MAs and that they could not find a job in the field – one is working at a local big box store.

MA’s do not end up with a professional license in most states – they work under the MD’s license. With that situation there is no ‘governing board’ or union to ‘protect’ the public as far as their practice goes.

IF you want to go into this area that is great! I would not want to start off with it as my first exposure. I would recommend starting with CNA and then going into this, EMS or maybe nursing.

 

Cross ref    http://www.preparesurvivethrive.us/emt-v-cna/

 

EMT v CNA

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“Helping You Live The Life You Want, If Times Get Tough, Or Even If They Don’t”. Jack from TSP [ www.TheSurvivalPodcast.com ] does a good job of articulating it.

Another and older way of saying this is that “Provident living is a way of life.” Which is how many of us were raised. I have lived by this for MANY years. It is too bad that some forget to pass it on to their kids and grandkids.

Anyway the point that I would like to make as far as skills go from a medical standpoint is that EMT training is great and “sexy” and all of that and it does come in handy at times. For entry level though and to be able to earn money as you go or to have something that you could ‘fallback on” in this wonderful economy, it is hard to beat CNA training.

Certified Nursing Assistants typically have around 120 hours of classroom and clinical training [about 3 weeks] before they take the board test and get a license from the State Board of Nursing. Every hospital and/or nursing home is always short of good staff to care for patients. Pay rates can start as low as $8.00 an hour to as high as $15 -17 an hour depending on experience. In my 40+ years of nursing practice in everything from EMS, OR, OB to ICU/NICU, along with teaching nursing and medical students and CNAs & EMTs – the people who start out as a CNA and then go on to EMT or other training, consistently do better than the ones who do EMT first and then CNA.

Another issue to ponder; there are 24 hours in the day. EMT [and Paramedic] focuses on the “golden hour” which is the first hour after an injury in a day to day situation; CNA teaches you how to care for a person for the 23.5 + hours that it takes someone to recover after the injury.

Which is going to be used more?

YMMV but that is my 2 cents worth [not adjusted for inflation]

 

Medical Assistant