What’s the easiest way to stay healthy on the job after we’ve trained you up as a medical assistant out of our Louisville, Kentucky program? Is it eating healthy food? Doing the Dracula sneeze (where you cover your mouth with your arm)? Exercising? Getting a flu shot?
These are all part of the picture to which we add one simple technique that is critical: hand washing. The famous doctor and author Atul Gwande has written about this in several of his books and in the New Yorker. Specifically, he notes how hard it is to get people to take the time to do it.
There’s one way you can have a big impact as a trained medical assistant: insist on those hand washing dispensers that provide instant hand sanitizer, so that washing is convenient when a full soap and water wash is difficult. And, if you get your patient as well as your doctor to follow through themselves, you could make a big difference.
If you look at Gwande’s writing, he points out that competence and success requires more persistence and follow through than it does heroic use of flashy techniques. Want to save lives in a doctor’s office during flu season? Washing up is critical.
Consider getting trained as a medical assistant in one of our Lexington Kentucky programs and get started down the road to doing important life-saving work. Give us a call and take a tour.