A new school on San Antonio’s south side is designed to help train the next generation of medical assistants. The plan is to graduate more professionals ready to step in and fill important jobs in the city’s medical community.
Every day, there’s a greater need for more medical assistants in San Antonio. These men and women fill important jobs in offices and clinics all over town. WellMed, one of the city’s largest employers of medical assistants, found they were having to retrain some recent graduates once they were on the job.
“They had been in school for nine months, but they really had no idea what it was like to work in a clinic,” explained Lee Garner, director of the new Medical Preparatory School of Allied Health, “to work directly for a doctor eight hours a day, 40 hours a week.”
So WellMed opened the new school at 509 SW Military Dr. on the south side, where many of its medical assistants are coming from.
The program takes ten months, but costs significantly less than many other medical assistant schools, $8,000 as opposed to an average of $14,000.
The new school focuses on clinical training, with lots of hands-on teaching and two rounds of on-the-job rotations.
34-year-old Niketa Baltimore believes she has what it takes, which is an ability to multi-task. “I don’t like to do the same thing over and over again,” Baltimore said. “I like the challenges. I like to be able to go into the office and say ‘what are we doing today and what’s going to be going on?’”
Starting salaries for medical assistants can range from $8.50 to $10.00 an hour. WellMed plans to hire many of its graduates, growing its own, you might say, to fill a need.
“You know, a medical assistant is a pretty important person in that clinic,” Garner stated, “because they probably spend about 70% of the time with the patient, where the doctor spends 20% - 30% of the time.”
The Medical Preparatory School of Allied Health opened this week with its first nine students. When they graduate from the program, they’ll be qualified for one of the fastest growing positions in health care.
