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Can a clinical MT ever be an acute care MT - catlady


Posted: Apr 13, 2010

How long does it take for a clinical MT to become an acute care MT, or I am losing my mind even trying?  I have an interview with WalMart today and am actually considering it.... my confidence is down the toilet.  Any thoughts?  Thanks.

It's just a matter of getting experience - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
It's not 'becoming' anything, it's just finding a place that will let you try. Do you work for a company that could let you work on overflow acute care stuff, just to get used to it? Have you considered taking an in house position at a hospital?

It can be done, but it's difficult. - CrankyOldBroadOnTheBeach

[ In Reply To ..]
I had 36 years of clinical experience in multiple specialties, and when my old boss closed down his practice and I went looking for work, I couldn't even get arrested. Most of the acute care places wouldn't even let me take their test. Then I applied at TRS (since merged with Transcend) and the recruiter was impressed enough with my test result (and it was an acute care test at that), she hired me, and they up-trained me into acute care.

But it's been a steep learning curve. Even now, nearly a year and a half later, I am STILL learning new things just about every day. The H & Ps, consults, and discharge summaries are really no different than what you will find in clinical work; it's the op reports and procedures that are the kickers. It's been (and is still being) an interesting ride.

All you can do is keep trying, see if you can persuade anybody to take a chance on you.

I even called one of the top MT schools and asked if they had a crash course in acute care for someone in my situation. They didn't, and offered to enroll me in their complete course. Since I could have probably taught at least half of the course in my sleep, I said no, thank you.

Best of luck. You're not losing your mind any worse than the rest of us are.............

Yes, of course they can - Redpen

[ In Reply To ..]
Of course you can! You're not considering becoming a rocket scientist . . . you're just going to expand your current abilities a bit.

If someone told you that you "had only" made cookies and brownies, so you could never learn to make bread or pies, would you believe them? Would you believe that you could never make soup from scratch because you had only made it from cans?

Some people learn to make soup without ever seeing a can. They start off learning to make it from scratch. This seems normal to them. They would be surprised to hear someone say that it was too hard to learn.

There is a "you can't" mindset in a lot of occupations. I see it in MT with "you can't learn to transcribe acute care if you do office dictation." I see it in coding with the notion that inpatient coding is somehow more difficult and that outpatient coders would never be able to learn it. I see ambulatory surgery coders telling other outpatient coders that they would never be able to learn it. I don't like seeing this kind of thinking, because I feel it puts unfounded limitations on people. I think the underlying motive for it is a need to shut people out, and I think that is not a good thing.

In both industries, a lot of the nay-saying about learning the job to begin with or learning something new in the job is based on an interest in limiting the number of people who work in the field. It limits the competition for jobs. It limits the number of coworkers who might outshine the shining star.

I'm telling you this so that you will be able to understand where your doubts come from and thus be able to get past them.

People learn to transcribe acute care dictation every day, and they learn to code inpatient every day, and most of them learn to do it without ever having known anything about the field before! If they can do this, SO CAN YOU. You can even do it faster because you already have a lot of the required knowledge, skills, and abilities. You don't have to learn how to transcribe again . . . you only have to learn what is contained in different material and what it sounds like.

If you were going to learn to make soup from scratch, what would you do? Drag out a pot and experiment until you hit on the right solution? That would be one way to do it, and you might be able to pull it off, but there is a good likelihood that it might take too long, you might ruin a lot of perfectly good food in the process, and your family might abandon you to eat at McDonald's. If you couldn't find the ingredients for soup to begin with, you might not even be able to start trying.

You could also get a recipe book for making soup. In other words, you could find something that would tell you what to do and give you some practice doing it--easy recipes, intermediate recipes, and challenging recipes. The recipe book might be all you need. You might also think about supplementing it with a soup-making expert to help you on your way.

In MT, some people might be able to learn to transcribe acute care if they had enough material to work with and enough time to experiment. These situations are few and far between. Your expense will be in time spent experimenting and possibly in losing clients if your experiments don't measure up right away.

A faster, more secure route might be to get a recipe book. There are training materials that will teach you how to transcribe acute care dictation. If you felt it was necessary, you might also get someone to advise you. Your expense would be for the "recipe book," but you would save time and wouldn't lose any jobs or clients. This is probably the most cost-effective route.

Since you're an experienced MT, you can get some acute-care training materials and work through them on your own. If you've never been trained using the SUM program, you might want to go through that first, just so you're sure you have a good foundation. Yes, there is a cost, but job preparation nearly always involves an investment like this. The materials are available on the AHDI website, but you might be able to find some second-hand on e-Bay or Amazon. If the prospect of doing this on your own seems daunting and you think an instructor might help, then perhaps the expense of a formal course would be reasonable for you.

Regardless of how you do it, just be assured that yes, you CAN do this. Quite easily, I think.









yes you can - typetypetypeaway

[ In Reply To ..]
great positive note to poster above...it is all in how you think about things...and I liked your analogy. Positives are always better than negatives. Good luck.

Go on the interview...but you can be acute care MT - jm0405

[ In Reply To ..]
Companies like Focus train you in acute care. It's a matter of finding the right company so you can learn instead of the ones that want 5+ years' experience in acute care to hire you or even consider you.


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