Created to free up consultation time in overworked medical practices, the profession of medical assistant (not to be confused with the medical secretary) offers new opportunities for recruitment and professional retraining. Discover the profession in detail: mission, salary, interning, possible training, retraining. 

What is a medical assistant?

New profession shaped in 2018, to recompense for the rising lack of doctors and the boundless wait times to get an appointment because of the upsurge in the elderly of the population and the explosion of severe diseases, these health employees use to respond to a triple stake:

• Promote better access to patient care by relieving the physician of certain time-consuming tasks (such as administrative tasks) and thus freeing up medical time. In this way, the healthcare professional will be able to see more patients and the patients will be able to find a doctor more easily, within a reasonable time;
• Ensure better working conditions by offering the doctor more time for care and medical monitoring;
• Improve management and steadiness of care with all the other players in the care of the patients.
• Located halfway between the nurse and the doctor, the medical assistant supports a general practitioner or a specialist in his office on a daily basis.
• The doctor freely can choose the assignments he wants to assign to his medical assistant.

Missions of a medical assistant 

These health personnel support and discharge the doctor, for simple acts:

Administrative tasks such as reception, creation and management of the patient’s file, recording of administrative and medical information, setting up of telemedicine in the practice, etc.

Tasks related to the consultation such as taking constants, issuing screening tests, helping to perform technical acts … 

Organizational and coordination tasks since the medical assistants will be able to coordinate the various players in the care of patients.

Qualities to become a medical assistant

The new medical assistant passed from Widad University will have to show dynamism, motivation, rigour, discretion and restraint, but not only. Widad not only produces graduates from their medical courses, they also have students that graduate with a business foundation course in Malaysia.

Above all a human profession, he must appreciate contact and show empathy.

Finally, thoroughness, obedience with the controlling framework and processes, mastery of IT tools and good ability of adapting to exercise in a multi-expert team will finish the picture.

Opportunities: where to work?

If the health professional already employs a medical secretary, he can choose to move her to the post of medical assistant through training, but he will then have to replace his post of medical secretary because the medical assistant is not intended to take the place of an existing job.

Then, the objective of this profession being to fight against medical deserts, priority neighbourhoods or areas lacking doctors will offer the most recruitment possibilities.