Hey LoliLolly,
I want to share my experience and hopefully it will help. I was hired right out of nursing school to be a patient educator at a family practice clinic. They wanted me to mostly do diabetes education, but since I didn't have a lot of experience or knowledge I couldn't go on to be a certified diabetic educator. Any way, I was the only nurse who worked in the clinic, all other clinical support staff were MAs. It was really hard at first because I didn't know where my place was. I didn't have a true job description and my managers hadn't had a nurse working in the clinic for so long it's like they forgot what a nurse could do! So I just made my own description and list of duties. One thing that I did do was a lot of patient education. Depending on how well the MAs are trained, they usually do not provide very good education just because they themselves haven't been educated. I had my own office (within the office) where patients could set up appointments with me to just learn more about pretty much any medication disorder, but I did a lot of education on diabetes, hypertension, high cholestrol, being over weight. I also had cooking classes where people could come and sample food from healthy recipes. The other thing that I did a lot of was educating the MAs. A lot of doctor's offices are using MAs a lot more and while at times it is frustrating, in the end they aren't going away and I wanted to make sure that they were providing the best education to the patients as possible. Every other week I had a meeting some with where we discussed a certain disease process and I answered (tried any way!) any questions they might have. Other things that I did was take walk in appointments for things such as flu shots, IMMs, teaching patients how to give self injections for things like lovenox or insulin, blood pressure checks, etc. I also filled in for the MAs when needed. I also took it upon myself to check for expired medications and supplies. I wasn't at that clinic for very long mostly because I felt as a new grad I wasn't advancing in my skills very much. Before I left I was also educating the doctors on what nurses could do and trying to get more patients to come to the clinic for things such as dressing changes. I hope that things are looking up a little bit! Education for everyone was definitely the name of the game for me!
