Medical personnel are highly respected and do so much to keep the public healthy and safe. Without medical professionals, we wouldn’t have access to routine or emergency healthcare which we rely on often.

If you’re considering a career in medical assisting, Ohio Business College has you covered with an excellent medical assistant program at both our Lorain County and Sandusky campuses. We’ll help prepare you for a career in medical assisting with both textbook and hands-on training in a variety of subject matters.

While we offer an exceptional medical assistant program here at OBC, we want you to understand that along with proper education and training you’ll need something else for a successful medical assisting career: leadership traits.

Certainly, some people are born to lead and already exhibit leadership qualities, but others need to learn and hone leadership traits to prepare them for the complex and dynamic field of medical assisting. If you’re in the latter, keep reading to learn the 4 leadership traits for medical assisting careers. It’s never too late to sharpen your leadership skills!

1. Communication

As a medical assistant, you’ll be dealing with a lot of different people in a given day: doctors, patients, pharmacies, etc. Each person that you come in contact with needs you to effectively communicate in order to keep patients healthy and things in the office running smoothly.

Efficient and effective communication between doctors and medical assistants is paramount when it comes to the overall health and safety of patients. From the time a patient walks in the door to the time their treatment is complete, you’ll need to have excellent communication skills. Medical assistants are the middleman between doctors and patients, therefore, you’ll need to effectively communicate patient diagnoses and instructions in layman's terms so they can fully understand.

2. Compassion

It goes without saying that having compassion for the patients you are helping treat is a necessary and important part of your job. Individuals who are seeking medical attention are either unwell or need to undergo routine medical exams or procedures that can cause quite a bit of anxiety and uneasy feelings. Medical assistants can do a great deal to make patients feel at ease from the time their vitals are taken to the time they’re walking out the door. Listen to them, show you care and answer their questions in a compassionate manner. Patients will forever be grateful for a medical assistant who treated them with care during their visit, something that will get you far in the medical field.

3. Adaptability

Looking for a career where no two days are the same? Welcome to being a medical assistant where each day is different from the last! Each day in the medical field is filled with patients exhibiting different symptoms, undergoing dissimilar procedures or are needing different treatments.

Not only do daily tasks differ day to day but patients themselves differ. Therefore, it’s crucial to be adaptable to any and all situations that may present themselves. Being able to deal with a medical emergency and being able to quickly adapt to each scenario will prove useful in order to be a successful medical assistant.

4. Willingness to Learn

Finally, a medical assistant should always be willing and eager to learn new things. There is always something to learn in the medical field and things are constantly changing. A willingness to learn is something that will make your job easier and make you stand out to your employer. Whether it be a new medical device in the office, an extremely rare diagnosis you’ve never dealt with, or staying up to date on advances in medicine, a willingness to learn is a crucial trait that all medical assistants should have.

If you have any of these leadership qualities then becoming a medical assistant is a great choice! By exhibiting the 4 traits above, you’re going to make your future in medical assisting brighter and more successful. Don’t worry if you don’t have all of these traits; you can hone them to sharpen your leadership skills.

Our medical assisting program will expose you to various subject matters like phlebotomy, pharmacology, medical law and ethics, and more. We understand that you have other priorities like a job or taking care of your family, which is why we offer both day and night classes to better accommodate our busy students.

We also offer FAFSA application assistance and provide financial aid for those who need it. We want to make sure your dreams can be achieved whether that’s through financial aid or not. We believe no student should be denied enrollment due to finances.

Ready to get your medical assistant career started? Enroll in Ohio Business College’s medical assisting program today! When you start your education at OBC, you’re paving your way to a successful new career.