I struggle with my paperless office
I decided to start writing a lot more about my life, my job and my office.
I’m a 32 year old medical secretary from Long beach New York, originally from London England, married to a baker and our household is awake at 4 am every morning!
I finish at 5 pm, so quite a long day, but my husband is home by 2 pm.
Our time apart is a good time for me to write, so here goes
Becoming a medical administrative assistant was a challenging position with significant responsibilities, but my degree leant itself to this kind of job and the salary is excellent.
Although my job isn’t medical or overly patient-facing it doesn’t mean it isn’t one that requires a significant amount of dedication!
The responsibilities of being a medical administrator are rewarded with above average pay, and there is a reason for that!
I have identified some touchpoints I would like to share and I wonder how many other people have similar problems in their office environment ?
Dealing With Difficult Personalities
Communicating with patients very often means dealing with scared, confused, and angry people and the Consultants and doctors themselves can be very demanding in their own right!
A Heavy Workload because of a lack of joined up thinking !
Running a healthcare facility comes with a lot of paperwork and there is my gripe, thats the nub, that’s the rub, this is my complaint.
In a world of wireless internet and smartphones, I fail to understand why its all so complex and why the Printer still seems to be the shrine.
It’s like the kitchen space in a house where everybody congregates next to the coffee machine.
I have inherited a mish mash of paper written doctors notes, a central management system that was commissioned in 2004, files galore and paper doesn’t talk to computers !
It’s not joined up and feels cobbled together rather than strategically compiled.
Why is this a problem when ostensibly, we allegedly have a paperless office.
There seems to be a trust problem, as if “if its not written down it might be lost” culture
The paperwork is an important part of my job to keep the gears turning behind the scenes, enabling everyone else to do their job professionally.
But my day is impeded by file chasing and haulage !
Dealing With a Lack of Physical Activity
As with most clerical roles, working medical administrative assistant is mostly a desk job.
While there is nothing wrong with working at a desk, most of us do it, being entirely desk-bound can have a negative effect on your health.
If you’re proactive enough to fit in the right kind of exercise to stave off the problems associated with office work, thats ok, I run almost every day, the park is beautiful, that bit I have overcome.
I am the Go-To Problem Solver
A constant never ending stream of requests and telephone calls with zero automation !
Clients cannot book into a central diary and the booking system still relies heavily on incoming telephone, very often into a disorganised Consultants diary shared with a private diary, its a constant problem with return calls and new arrangements .
With all this Covid kerfuffle I noticed such reliance on QR codes.
Quite clever I thought, so if its good enough for Government Departments its good enough for my office.
And here we are.
I identified about 10 areas I could implement QR codes, independently of the office metrics, and it has worked !
It has worked because my workload is much more manageable.
Here is what I achieved:
On my desk and around the clinic
A Brochure with QR linking to a dedicated booking email.
QR on the wall head height and large for:
Parking ticket redemption
Clinic map
Covid rules
Toilets
WiFi
Emergency ( on brochure as well )
Map geo code
Opening times
Staff
Payment ( links to website)
Clerical ( 10 codes )
Advisory ( 20 codes linked to you tube mainly )
Thank you for listening, maybe we will eventually go paperless, but for now using paper to connect to the Smartphone has been an outstanding success for managing my time !
Jasmine Woodward Newswire article August 2021
