 So this is gonna be completely unscripted, so I'm just warning you there's gonna be some rambling. I didn't plan anything I was gonna say right now. I just had some thoughts and I thought I'd just share them with you. So I just worked what's probably gonna be my last shift ever as a medical assistant. I might come back for a few days here and there during the next semester, but more than likely this was it. This was my last one. So like I said on Instagram, oh sharp turn. Anyway so like I said on Instagram today we've got a four week break from PA school for the summer so I just went back to work as a medical assistant. It's a job that I had before PA school how I got a lot of my PCE hours and it was a really good way to do it. And so since this was my last shift as a medical assistant I started having some thoughts. I was getting kind of nostalgic like hey this is hopefully my last time kind of on the staff side of things of the medical office before I start transitioning to the provider side of things. Now I'm not trying to get too big for my bridges you know I'm only like two semesters into PA school and we got two more months in didactic and then we have the whole clinical year and there's the pants and etc all that stuff. But that being said in a couple months I'm gonna start going on clinicals. I'm gonna be sitting with other PAs going in the rooms just like a PA and really training to do that side of things. And then of course once I graduate I'm gonna be a PA so I'll be one of the actual providers at the practice or the hospital or urgent care or wherever I end up working. And so this is probably my last time working as a staff member as a support staff you know medical assistant and office folks things like that. So I just kind of wanted to share some of my thoughts and also if this video is still up like a year and a half from now when I start working as a PA it's going to be interesting to go back and see what my perspective is now. So I actually plan to make a video like this just before going on rotations and just kind of sharing my side of things as a staff member as like support staff in the medical office before I really start experiencing the provider side of things in any way. But this being my last day I just thought I'd do it now. Also this is a really beautiful neighborhood. Upstate New York is gorgeous. What else? What other kind of random stuff can I talk about before I even think about what I wanted to say? I think I have ADD. I'm pretty sure I have ADD. Oh yeah hand sanitizer. This video is being made during the COVID-19 pandemic and so in healthcare we're wiping everything down after every single patient. We're constantly sanitizing our hands our surfaces our computers and so we're going through a lot of hand sanitizer and the hand sanitizer we got at work is really gross. It's like this green stuff and it's really sticky. It just like leaves a residue on your hands. It smells fine and I'm sure clean's just fine but it's sticky and it's freaking annoying and it's impossible to put on gloves after you used it. So I've started like shopping around for my own hand sanitizer. I got one of these from Equate. It's the Walmart brand or Target Target or Walmart. Got one of these. That's just the Purell. It's fine. Honestly the best hand sanitizer I've come across is from this company I've never even heard of like Wish or something. I got this from a runnings outdoor shop and this stuff actually smells really nice. It like it goes on fine and it dries and then it actually smells kind of good. So I was really pleasantly surprised when I bought this stuff but anyway no this video is not sponsored by Wish Hand Sanitizer. I have no idea where they sell this stuff besides runnings and I know nothing about the company. I just know that their stuff smells kind of good and I don't know I like it. I definitely have ADD. But anyway okay so my last day as a medical assistant what are my thoughts? First things first and I'll be really interested to see if my perspective changes or if it just evolves when I get on the provider side of things. From my perspective working as a medical assistant, working with the nurses, the support staff are seriously the backbone of any medical office. They do the heavy lifting. They do all the stuff that allows providers to actually be providers and practice patient care. You keep hearing about like about like doctor, PA, provider burnout because they keep having to do all these administrative tasks and all this stuff for insurance and just like all the problems with our modern health care system basically. And so to some extent that's true all the charting, all the insurance worrying about what meds are going to get covered, what's not going to get covered all that stuff is definitely a factor. But guess who lifts 99% of that burden off of the providers? The staff. The insurance, the billing staff, the office manager, the medical assistants, some of the nurses depending on how the practice is run all that stuff is being dealt with by the staff. That's why offices have staff checking patients in, getting their histories, reviewing their meds, making sure all their information is up to date, pulling the latest labs, pulling the latest imaging, seeing if they were at the ER, if they maybe got surgery because if anyone who's ever dealt with patients knows, they don't always tell you everything. Sometimes they don't know, sometimes they forget, sometimes they just think they're going to get away with not telling you something, just going in a room and talking to a patient and basing all of your knowledge off of that is just not good enough anymore. And so we have things like statewide databases, which we have in New York and it's amazing, especially in an emergency situation, you can just log on and with the patient's consent, you can pull all of their latest labs, imaging, ER notes, specialty care notes, all kinds of stuff, and you can basically have a great idea of the patient and their level of care, what meds they're on, all that stuff from that record before the provider even goes in the room. So all of that stuff and putting all that stuff into the patient's chart, keeping it up to date, that's the medical assistant's job, sometimes the nurses help with that kind of stuff. But doing that work basically makes it so the doctor only has to be a doctor, or the PA only has to be a PA. They just look at all of the patient's history, they look at the latest lab results, imaging studies, whatever, and then they go talk to the patient and do their own history and physical and evaluate the patient medically, form a diagnosis, form a treatment plan, all that stuff that PAs and doctors do. So my point with that really long ramble I just gave you is that medical staff are extremely important and they're not to be taken for granted. At work I keep joking around, is that a real person? What the hell? That is really creepy. There's like some weird mannequin in some guy's front yard, I couldn't tell if it was a real kid or not. No, he's moving. He's moving. Okay, that was really creepy. Anyway, so that's just a perspective I have as a staff member, as a medical assistant, and that's something I really hope I never lose as a provider, just understanding how important your support staff are, how much easier they make your job, how much more difficult your job would be without those support staff, and how important it is to treat those staff members well, not just being nice to them or saying hi to them or occasionally buying them lunch, but actually understanding that they are professionals, they're very passionate about their jobs, they like what they do, and they think it's important, and you as the provider need to encourage that and encourage them to grow as people, as professionals, understand how much they do for you and how much they make your life easier. So I'm probably going to repeat myself, but one thing I really hope I never lose when I move over to the provider side is appreciating the support staff. And if this video is still up in a year and a half, a few years down the line whenever, and you're one of my support staff, and I'm taking you for granted for it can show it to me and call me out, it's completely not okay to not respect your support staff. What they do is super important and you can't do your job without them. All right, I'm home. So I'm sure there was more I wanted to ramble about, but honestly, I think that was the most important thing, and the shadows on my face are making me look like a skeleton right now. It's kind of weird. Is that better? That's way better. Maybe I should just film with my sunroof closed. I thought it looked kind of cool with you know, the sky going by in the video, but maybe it would be better if this was closed. I don't know, what do you think? Okay, there was a couple more things I wanted to talk about. Why don't we go around the block again, except I need the AC now because the sunroof is closed and it's really hot in here. It's like, okay, it's not 67. There's no way it's 67. It's hot. Anyway, so two other things I wanted to talk about that I was thinking about today, my last day as a medical assistant. My phone just shut down on me. It said it's too hot to run the camera. Have you ever had that? Your phone heats up from the sun so much that it won't even use the camera. Anyway, I just sat there at the stop sign holding my phone up to the air conditioning, just trying to cool it down so it would finally record. So it's finally cool enough to record. Anyway, so two more things I wanted to talk about that I was thinking about on my last day as a medical assistant. So one of those things is if you're pre-PA, you're trying to apply to PA school and you're working a job like a medical assistant or a CNA or an EMT or something to try to get your PCE, your patient contact, or your patient care experience hours, which has a requirement to apply to most PA schools, I think it's really important to find a job that actually gives you good experience. It doesn't just give you the numbers but gives you really good experience. So for instance, my job, I honestly think was perfect. My first patient care experience I started with, I was a CNA, a certified nurse aid, and I ended up working in a nursing home and also in home care. So I was responsible for people's medical care in their own home, doing some range of motion exercises with them, writing down their vitals, communicating with the nurses if I found anything that looked suspicious like a skin lesion. And that was really good. That was a lot of responsibility really fast and it kind of got me right into the medical field. The next thing I did was scribing. I was a scribe at the ER and that's like a baptism by fire. They throw you right in there and you have to learn really, really quick. All this medical lingo, all these lab results, I remember EKGs were my nemesis, figure out what to do when the doctors were dictating EKGs because there's just so much lingo, so much different stuff that you have to know because you're making these charts, you're transcribing what the doctor is saying, which means you have to know the words that they're actually saying. Even if you don't know exactly what they mean, you have to know what they sound like and how to spell them and things like that. So that was just a ton of knowledge really, really quick. It was very stressful, high learning curve, but I'm really glad I did it because it really increased my knowledge base really quickly. But anyway, so there was scribing and then finally I left that job in order to go do this, which is medical assisting. And at this job, I was able to apply a lot of that knowledge of labs, imaging, medical terminology I'd learned about and actually get hands-on with patients, ask them about their history, about their symptoms, how they're feeling, what medications they're on, what they think has been working, about their family and social histories. All kinds of stuff that was really pertinent to their medical care and filling out their chart as completely as I could before the PA or nurse practitioner or doctor would go see them. So at this last job, not only was I in the room with patients, but I was also reviewing charts because I was sorting facts as that came in and so labs would fax the lab results to us, imaging studies, if somebody ends up in the ER, the ER will fax the record over to us. And then as a medical assistant, I had to sort those records into the patient's charts and task the provider with reviewing those records. And so of course as I'm doing that, I'm looking at the chart, I'm reading it, I'm looking at the lab results. I see medication names over and over and over again, and it's just learning by repetition. No, I didn't always have time to look up the mechanism of action or what the medications used for, but then when I saw those same medications in PA school, I kind of had that little bit of an advantage because I had heard about them a lot. And if you've ever studied pharmacology, you understand that it's like a different language. It's not English. Those names are ridiculous. I don't know who made them up, but there's so many syllables, nothing makes sense. And it's just really hard, at least for me personally to study. I don't memorize things well. So having this job where I came across lots and lots of different medication names, yeah, it's stressful in the room when the patient has like 40 different medications and you only have five minutes to check them in and see what's current and what's not. Yeah, that's stressful, but at the same time it's that repetition that I feel like really helped me. So if you're working a job to get patient care hours for PA school, that's something I really think you should focus on, not just getting the hours and trying to be competitive based on the number of hours you have, but really trying to get a job that gives you quality experience that makes you learn something every single day and that'll tremendously help you as a PA student and of course as a future PA. Another thing I think you should focus on is if possible try to get a job that actually allows you to be one on one with patients and practice your bedside manner, practice talking to all kinds of different people, practice talking to people who don't speak English, using a translator. You're going to have to learn how to do all that kind of stuff as a PA and I'm definitely going to have to learn how to do it on a much higher level in clinical year. But I think that the experience as I had at this job where I was one on one in the room with patients getting all kinds of information out of them, I think that's really going to help me because I have that experience and I can much more quickly and efficiently lead a patient interaction in the direction that I needed to go. So I think that's going to be very important for me personally and I highly recommend that you try to find a job that allows you to do something like that because that's probably the hardest thing to learn. It's not the medications or the pathophysiology of the diseases, it's learning to deal with lots and lots of different kind of people that your patient care experience really teaches you and so I think it's important to try to find a job that allows you to do that and really practice and hone those skills. Oh man, what else did I want to talk about? The importance of medical support staff, the importance of quality health care experience, what else? Well, you know what, when I left the parking lot I had two more ideas to talk about but I guess it's only going to be one. I think I've rambled long enough. If anybody's still watching this video, thank you for sticking with me. Like I said at the beginning of the video, thank you. I'm Boris, I'm a first-year position assistant student. I was just working as a medical assistant before PA school and then during this break from PA school we had during the summer and this is my last day as a medical assistant. So I was just reflecting on some things that I learned as a medical assistant and some things that I really want to focus on as I transition into that provider side of health care. Anyway guys, that's really all I had to say. I'm sure there was more I was thinking throughout the day that I just didn't have time to write down. You guys know how it is working in medicine, you just constantly move on to the next patient, on to the next thing, there's always something to do. So anyway, I just wanted to say that if I have more thoughts I'm going to make another video or something. But for now that's really all I had to say. It's kind of bittersweet my last day as a medical assistant. I really did love this job. I'm really grateful to the people that hired me and allowed me to come back every time there's a break from PA school and I can just go and work whenever I have time. So that was just really awesome. If you have anybody working in the medical field you think can get some benefit out of it and I'll see you in the next one.