Emergency Room Receptionist

The first person a scared patient rushing to the emergency room sees is not a Doctor or a Nurse; it’s an Emergency Room Receptionist. The Emergency Room Receptionist takes charge of collecting patient information, processing paperwork, and monitoring the waiting list. As an Emergency Room Receptionist, you must be both fast and efficient as well as calm and collected all at once.

A hurried trip to the ER starts with info collection. You ask the patient or his parent to fill out paperwork stating his name, his birth date, and the reason for his visit. For accidents that can’t wait, you flag down a Doctor and have the patient rushed back for treatment. In the case of less time-sensitive injuries — like a broken wrist — you give the patient a wristband with his name on it, and have him sit in the waiting room until a Nurse becomes available.

Paperwork and answering the telephone take up a lot of your time on the clock, but calming upset patients is the most crucial aspect of your work. When the waiting room is busy, patients get grumpy and tense. You reassure them that the wait will be short and they haven’t been forgotten.

Your work largely resembles a secretarial job, but with a higher reliance on good communication skills. From soothing an upset mother whose child is sick to directing a waiting patient to the nearest restroom, you take the fear out of a visit to the ER.