Anybody seeking a career in medical assisting will want to know what their duties will consist of before they begin their career. This is where studying the medical assistant job description comes in. While there are many different duties that a medical assistant is responsible for, at the most basic, they are charged with administrative and simple clinical tasks.

The most obvious of the medical assistant’s duties consists of clinical tasks. The reason these are the most obvious is because these are the duties that everybody sees them performing. A medical assistant’s clinical duties include rooming patients, recording their reasons for seeing the physician, taking vital signs, collecting specimens, as well as giving injections.

It is also in the medical assistant job description to do clerical duties. Clerical duties consist of filing patient charts, entering patient data into the computer, calling in prescriptions and refills, filling out referrals and sometimes scheduling. Of course, the number of duties will be affected by the number of staff working in the office.

It is also the medical assistant’s job to keep the office clean and orderly. This consists of cleaning examination rooms, filing charts and organizing instruments. These duties are essential to making the environment comfortable for both the patients and the staff in the medical office.

Further duties that a medical assistant will be required to perform include: conducting routine lab tests, explaining to the patient how to take prescribed medications, scheduling appointments with specialists for patients, filling out insurance forms, removing sutures, changing wound dressings and bandages and sterilizing and setting up equipment for the physician. These types of duties are performed as they are needed, which will be quite frequently in a busy office. Depending on the type of office a medical assistant is working in and how many employees there are, their job may or may not require them to perform as many administrative tasks such as sending faxes or checking patients in at the front desk.

If the medical assistant is working in a very large clinic or office, the number and types of tasks that will be expected of them will be much larger. However, wherever a medical assistant procures a job they will be expected to perform both administrative and clinical duties.

It is clear that the medical assistant job description is very broad, which means that many tasks and duties can be assigned to them. Due to the fact that medical assistants can perform so many duties many health clinics and hospitals will hire medical assistants for various positions that will allow the health care providers and clinics run in an efficient manner.