HayMA

That all helps so much! You have no idea how much I appreciate your courteous response!

Unfortunately as far as clinical staff goes, we have one LPN, one "stress lab LPN" and myself. I just did a little research and found that a medical assistant is indeed not supposed to "independently triage", which is confusing because we did train on triage some in school and the person whom worked the position before me didn't even have any medical training, just experience. I definitely will be taking a message and consulting the doctor before I ever advise a patient again, especially if they refuse an ER visit! Thanks for the quick response, I think I'll be discussing this with my office manager tomorrow as well. I knew this was overwhelming for a reason.

I am a new medical assistant and got hired on at my extern site which happened to be a cardiovascular clinic. As you would expect, we have patients call all day with angina and other MI symptoms. This may sound rediculous, but I find triage to be the most challenging task of my daily duties!! We have one doctor in the office that sees approximately 17 patients a day (that's without a lunch hour and working anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour past closing) whom is COMPLETELY overbooked for the next 3 months, we also have a brand new nurse practitioner who is expected to see up to 10 patients a day and is also overbooked (with 12-13 patients everyday) for the next month. When someone calls with angina, dyspnea, syncope and etc, I of course advise them to call 911 but as I'm sure you all know, only about 50% of patients will agree to this, so my question is what am I supposed to do?! I have worked them in for the day or the next recently and made quite a few coworkers a little irritated. How would you triage in this situation??!