Externships

Welcome to the Momentum Program and my guest now is Donna Phillips who is a Certified Medical Assistant and also our externship coordinator. Welcome, Donna. I'm so happy to have you with us. Donna, you're involved with our program quite a bit. You sit on our Advisory Board for the Medical Assistant program at the Buck Mickel Center, and you're involved with the externship program and you're helping us with placement of students once they've gone through the actual classroom setting. Tell us about that. What does that involve?

We're a little bit unique at Greenville Tech about where we place our externship students. We - instead of waiting until the end of the program and having the students go out for 6 weeks at one time, we place our students at the end of the various modules of the program. Once they have completed the second module of the program watch is the administrative portion, they go out and do a 2 week externship in a medical office in just the administrative portion - that's the clerical duties. Once they have completed the clinical portion of the program, they go out on a 2 week externship in the clinical duties. And so on and so forth with the laboratory portion.

So they go out - they are assigned to a doctor's office, they're under someone's winning for the 2 weeks, and they go through all the - if you will - training that's dedicated to that portion of what they learned in the classroom setting.

Exactly. We give them a checklist based on the clinical competencies that we make and expect them to learn in the classroom setting. So, they go out to the office. They are expected to practice those duties and to accomplish them successfully. Their proctor - preceptor rather - will check them off as having completed those duties successfully. Hopefully they'll get a good bit of experience doing that. This is something that has been beneficial to both the office and the student.

What a better way to get the hands on experience. That is right. Who're some of our partners within the externship program?
Well, first off, I must mention Southeastern Neurosurgical and Spine Institute who are my employers. Also, we have quite a few other offices. Milestone, Family Practices, Wes Butler Family Medicine, Christy Pediatric Group, Spartanburg Neurological, - I know I'm going to forget someone who is going to be upset with me - Parisview Family Practice, there are just so many offices that have been so wonderful in taking these students for us and they have wound up hiring these students - Oaktree

Which is another good practice.

Yes, Oaktree Family Medicine, Oaktree Orthopedic, they have several offices and they are just wonderful at placing students in their offices.
What do you feel are some of the challenges a new student encounters when they just start to go through the externship program?
Well, first off, if they are working , they obviously have to arrange to be off their normal job for two weeks. Secondly, they're going into an office where they don't know anyone and oftentimes it's totally new to them. However, most offices that we work with have been very good at welcoming students and showing them the ropes, giving a few days to get used to there way things work in that office before expecting them to just jump in and do things. Most students come back telling me they just love it. Thank you so much for this opportunity. So many of the students get hired just right off the bat from their externships.

That's just wonderful, isn't it?

It says a lot about the program.

Absolutely. What are some of the advancement opportunities for medical assistant? I mean what roles or what other careers in their path can they take or can they advance into once they've worked as a medical assistant?
Well, first off, medical assistant is a great challenge in itself. However, some students go on to become office managers, some become coders - Certified Medical Coders, which seems to be one of the hot jobs these days. It's very important right now with the way insurance and fraud and abuse and all these things are coming down. Some wind up going to the hospitals and working as coders. Some wind up working with the physicians in minor surgery settings. A lot of them wind up learning the labs in medical offices. We have several who have wound up being over the labs in their offices. Some are over all of the clinical staff in their offices. So, it's just a wide open field right now.

Very diverse.