While many of the more sophisticated medical management roles out there are filled by healthcare professionals, they exist within a highly regulated and protected industry. Healthcare professionals can only apply for these roles if they have been certified by a regulatory body, such as the American Board of Medical Specialties or the Royal College of General Practitioners.
If you want to be part of this elite group and take on a challenging and rewarding role in an industry that is moving at a rapid pace, then you need to prepare yourself for the rigours of medical management.
You need to be able to communicate with patients and their families with authority and confidence, while maintaining high morale at all times. You need to be able to internally manage your staff, resulting in better service delivered by them. And you also need to know how to work effectively with senior healthcare managers when they come calling.
Table of Contents
What is medical management?
If you’re like me, you have a couple of friends who have entered the world of medical management. I’m pretty sure that these are people who are qualified to be in medical management…but I don’t know if they are.
Because of this, I’m going to talk about the kind of people you might find in medical management, and how they differ from other types of professional roles. We all manage some things, but we don’t all manage all things; so if you can manage some things well, you can probably manage others better too.
We are going to start with the most important part: what does medical or healthcare management mean? Medical teams differ from other teams in that they tend to work on a long-term basis (and many tend to work more than one shift per day).
This is beneficial for being able to keep an eye on important patient quality of life issues, such as mental health and pain. With this in mind, it makes sense that managers would take an interest in managing the physical aspects of their patients too: not just in terms of medications or bedsides but also food and safety issues — which ensures that your patients get enough nutrition and restful sleep.
That’s why we need doctors too: they need to be involved with nurses so they can make sure their patients get proper care and prevent them from falling ill due to medication side effects.
But there is another reason why managers should care about these kinds of things: because if not managed properly, these issues could lead to unwanted problems or even death (particularly for older people with chronic conditions). So make sure your medical teams are doing their jobs well!
What skills are needed for a career in medical management?
The medical community is a complex, multi-faceted system. It is made up of physicians and other medical personnel, hospitals, nursing homes, social services and more.
The field itself is diverse. There are many specialisations within the field: some focused on treating specific diseases, others focused on preventing them or improving health overall.
But what about those in jobs like physician’s assistants or surgical technicians? Do they have the same breadth of training in different disciplines? And what about the role of a physician or surgeon — does this apply to their assistant as well? How do their roles compare to one another?
This guide aims to help answer these fundamental questions and to help you with your career planning.
What are the benefits of working in medical management?
Medical management is a job that many people think they know, but few have actually done. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a guide to medical management for quite a while now, but never put pen to paper until earlier this year.
After much thought, I decided that it was time I took some action. The obvious way for me to do this would be through my own experience — so I decided to write it myself.
The book itself was written whilst I was working at home, in the first person and is therefore personal and much like me. It aims to help those who are thinking seriously about entering the realm of medical management and includes interviews with other practitioners who have gone through the process themselves and others who have not (for example, doctors who choose to leave medicine).
This guide is aimed at those who are new to this field of work: I’ll explain what you need to know before you dive in, what you have already learned and what you need to be aware of during your time as a medical manager.
There will also be short sections on making your own life easier and getting more out of your work as well as tips for making hires better (as well as tips for getting along with them).
While medical management can be a rewarding career sector — which can provide good income, good travel and great opportunities — it can also feel like the end of the world if nothing goes right or if you are unhappy working there.
This is true whether you work in a hospital or clinic or an out-sourced facility or any other area where medical patients come into contact with health professionals (a fact which often makes us laugh a little when we hear from colleagues about how bad things are at hospitals).
So, at least get some advice now…
What are the challenges of working in medical management?
Medical management teams are some of the most gruelling, difficult, and rewarding jobs in the world. A medical team for a hospital usually consists of a number of different groups. The medical services manager (or MSM) is responsible for ensuring that all medical staff are performing to the highest standards. He or she also allocates resources to ensure that each group is getting what it needs.
The clinical operations team (COT) is responsible for ensuring that all doctors and other clinicians deliver the care they are contracted to provide. The clinical operations team is typically made up of surgical oncologists, radiation oncologists, dentists, general practitioners and so on. They all have different areas of responsibility to focus on:
• Surgical Oncology: Surgical Oncology teams perform minimally invasive surgery procedures on patients suffering from cancerous tumours. They also take care of patients who are not considered cancerous but need surgical intervention due to their underlying illness.
• Radiation Oncology: Radiation Oncology teams use radiographic imaging equipment to determine if a patient may benefit from radiation therapy and whether there’s an increase in risk if they receive it.
• Dentistry: Dentistry teams provide dental services as well as treatment and diagnosis based on their expertise in particular areas like cosmetic dentistry or periodontics (the science behind teeth). Most dentist teams have a multidisciplinary approach including medical specialists such as an internist or paediatric specialist who specialise in children’s orthodontics or paediatric dentistry; and dental specialists such as an orthodontist or periodontist who specialises in adult dentistry.
A combination of individual skills and expertise can be used to provide evidence-based medicine including orthodontics, periodontics and cosmetic dentistry – as well as treatment for cancer and other conditions – depending on what’s needed by the patient – age, illness, race or gender.
It’s often called Continuum Management because different groups will work differently together; the ones who can do it best? The ones that know how? And so forth… And then there’s always someone out there who isn’t sure what they do yet.
Most people think you’re better off working somewhere where you get more control over your own destiny (like private practice) — but mental health care has its challenges too — especially when you’re dealing with complex issues like suicide.
Conclusion
I am guessing that the most common reason for people reading this is because they want to work in healthcare. I’m not going to write a guide for all the jobs you can do in healthcare but if you are interested and want to work in one of these fields, I think this post might give you some insights.
I’ve written about many careers here (and there are many more reasons why healthcare is worth your time) but my favourite topics have been medicine and medicine technology. I also think that being a doctor isn’t the only thing you need to do in healthcare: part of your job is providing other people with care, which involves skills outside the medical ones.
I won’t write a lot about “How much will it cost me?” or “What kind of education am I looking for?” because that is something very specific to each company (and varies by region), but I will answer general questions such as “When should I start?” and talk about some aspects of finding a job in health care where there aren’t as many opportunities as there are here in Australia.
