Vantaggi
If you are interested in medicine (MD/DO, RN/NP, PA, etc) this job is the perfect opportunity to see what medicine is like in inpatient, outpatient, and ER settings (whichever site you are hired in). If you're talented and adaptable enough, perhaps you can work in multiple settings - I had a few scribes like this. Scribing gives you: - a crash course in medicine, especially in the ER. - an insight into the ins and outs of an EMR system which, TRUST me, is so so important in healthcare. - the opportunity to develop professional relationships with physicians and mid-level providers that lead to letters of recommendation. - an advantage in healthcare professional school. You enter school understanding the basics of medical terminology, diagnostics, classic disease presentation, and documentation. Basically, by the time you start school, you already have your first semester under your belt while everyone else is struggling to understand what you struggled to understand as a scribe. - the ability to develop your critical thinking. Typically after your first year scribing, and once you have the basics (discussed above), you start to think like a healthcare professional. You listen to the symptomatology and physical exam findings and start to think "the doc is going to X/Y/Z diagnostics." And when those diagnostics come back you start to think "based on these labs and these images, the patient probably has this disease process." And then start to think about the gold goose we all seek after that... medical decision making; HOW are we going to treat the patient? What treatments or procedures do they need? Where are they going to go? How do I coordinate this? THIS critical thinking is why you work as a scribe. You get the knowledge and experience of "treating" a patient before even going to school.
Svantaggi
- the pay, minimum wage --- again, you don't do this job for the money. - raises are yearly and only on a certain date, so you could be looking at 1.5 years before you get a raise (depending on when you're hired). Want to make more money as a scribe? be resourceful! Become a scribe trainer, or offer to do only nights (I fought for my scribe to get a dollar raise who requested a "nights only" schedule). - night shifts: If you're not a night owl, this will be difficult. But share the burden with your team. Even as a scribe manager I scheduled myself for night shifts so we all suffered evenly. - about a 3-month training process, which makes absolute sense! Think about it. You're hired, then get a "crash course in medicine" ... which SHOULD take at least a month of classroom training followed by at least one month of bedside training. Doctors go through extensive amounts of training to see their patients, doesn't it make sense that the people creating their legally binding patient notes also go through "extensive" training? - It's not an easy job. The training is extensive, the hours can be rough, and the sheer amount of material you need to know to start as a scribe is crazy in and of itself. BUT if you are interested
