You Won't Be Bored With This Job
Branell College Inc. and Hospital Corporation of America have developed the General Medical Technician Program in response to an HCA study showing that 44 percent of a medical assistant duties could be performed by a non-licensed person.
"HCA was experiencing a nursing shortage," says Susan Meadows, director of education for Branell College in Atlanta, where the program originated in late 1998. "By developing this career training program, we were able to free up nurses so they could work at a higher level of service," thus reducing the number of licensed nurses needed for medical assistant duties.
A study at Atlanta's HCA West Paces Ferry Hospital revealed that using GMTs could reduce the average cost for all personnel on the patient care team by 50 percent an hour. In addition, it decreased the amount spent on outside agency personnel by 41 percent.
The program has reduced the use of agency nurses, who are not familiar with hospitals and change jobs from one day to the next, Meadows says. West Paces Ferry Hospital reduced its use of agency nurses from 11 to zero percent by using GMTs. The GMT program, which takes six months to complete, began in Nashville last March and requires students to spend four months in classroom training at Branell College on Hillsboro Road. The remaining two months are spent at either HCA Southern Hills Medical Center or HealthTrust's Edgefield Hospital for inhouse clinical training. A team of nine nurses from three Atlanta HCA hospitals developed the program's curriculum, which includes physiology, human growth and development, charting and medical terminology, Meadows says. "GMTs provide basic patient care such as walking the patient, changing dressings, taking vital signs and charting," says Ann Sherman, a registered nurse and a Branell clinical instructor at Southern Hills Medical Center. "All hospitals have different titles for levels of care givers below licensed nurses, but GMTs are different from these positions because they learn why they are doing something instead of just how to do it," Meadows says. "In turn, they can make more decisions for themselves. Before this program, there was no consistency of nursing assistants' training, and they were not of the quality nurses wanted." Unlike the Registered Care Technologist program proposed by the American Medical Association, the nurse assistants report directly to the nurse instead of to the doctor. In addition, the program does not lead to licensure, and GMTs cannot administer medication.
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