OVERVIEW
The Medical Office Assistant Certificate Program trains students in administrative and clinical skills, emphasizing cultural safety, sensitivity, and trauma-informed care.
This program is designed to provide students with the skills, training, and knowledge required to work within a medical office. Additionally, students will learn how to create and maintain patient records as well as perform coding and billing. Students are taught how to assist physicians with examinations, prepare patients for clinical procedures and perform other administrative duties in various healthcare settings.
In consideration of Turpel-Lafond’s report “In Plain Sight: Addressing Indigenous-specific Racism and Discrimination in B.C. Health Care”, this program endeavours to familiarize frontline administrative medical office staff with the importance of cultural safety, cultural sensitivity, and trauma-informed care to better prepare them for future employment serving diverse populations.
Upon completion of the certificate program, graduates should be able to:
- Perform medical office tasks including scheduling appointments, documenting and maintaining medical records while maintaining confidentiality, managing time effectively, showing professionalism, and demonstrating ethical behaviour.
- Demonstrate an understanding of systemic influences that have resulted in racism and discrimination in the health care system.
- Assist physicians and prepare patients for examinations, clinical procedures, and tests.
- Manage the input and retrieval of data using electronic medical record software.
- Prepare bills for visits, supplementary items, and diagnostic procedures carried out in a medical office, a hospital, or home as dictated by the Medical Services Plan (MSP) of British Columbia.
- Create professional medical documents, letters, and emails that are respectful to the recipients and contain proper paragraphs, proper sentence structure, correctly spelled words, and abbreviations, and correct grammar.
- Transcribe medical dictation in the correct format for medical letters, chart notes, history and physical reports, discharge summaries, operative and pathology reports, and miscellaneous medical reports.
- Apply critical thinking and problem-solving techniques to resolve issues that can be found in a medical office.
- Demonstrate effective communication, interpersonal, and team skills in all work duties, where communication skills require clear spoken and written English, correct medical terminology, accurate spelling, and correct grammar.
- Name the organs, define medical terminology, and describe the functions, common disease processes, and symptoms that are associated with major body systems.
