Dental offices may have a dentist's name on the door, but usually, it takes more than just the dentist to handle the tasks that keep the business afloat. Instead, various workers, such as dental assistants, handle tasks from the moment the patients walk through the door till the practice closes for the day and prepares for the next day.

Dental assistant work is in very high demand right now. The Bureau of Labor Statistics lists the field's growth rate at 11%, making it a high-demand career in Portland. Becoming a dental assistant is a rewarding and varied career, offering the chance to see the inner workings of a healthcare practice if you have a goal of continuing with your education to participate in some other aspect of the field.  If you speak to any dentist who's gone through a hiring shortage, they'll tell you exactly the value of dental assistants. Offices run on the labor of these workers!

So many important aspects of a doctor's visit begin to solidify when you first walk in the door. Think about the difference between being greeted politely and immediately connected to your provider versus not being noticed and then being haphazardly registered and checked in for your appointment. As a Patient Access Specialist, you get the opportunity to make people feel connected, cared for, and ready for their appointments, all while doing important behind-the-scenes data collection that helps you to continue serving them well during the payment or insurance process.

Maybe you're asking, "What is a patient access specialist, anyway?" Patient access specialists are the workers who first interact with a person coming into a medical clinic or doctor's practice. Their combination of greeting and entering information into the scheduling and documentation databases is one of the vital components of keeping the practice running smoothly. As a Patient Access Specialist, you need a combination of skills to find success in helping patients feel at ease.

Dentistry has advanced in remarkable ways over the centuries. In just the past few decades alone, safe and frequent radiological scan technology has allowed dentists and orthodontists to understand the human mouth better. The information revealed in these scans helps dentists find potential problems before they are noticeable on the surface of the teeth and before they become a medical crisis or significant source of pain.

Dental assistant work exists in various dentistry contexts, including regular dental practices, emergency dentistry, orthodontics, and oral surgery. While the work varies from one practice to another, there is a need to take x-rays or other imaging scans accurately and safely in most of these contexts.

However, with this additional technology comes additional training for dental assistants who want to be versatile team members in dentistry practice. Understanding this additional training and how it benefits you shows how radiology for oral surgeons' certification can help you advance your career and keep strong job security as you consider future moves within the field.

While the reception workers in any business can make customers feel comfortable and well-oriented, there are few contexts where they are as vital as in the medical world. Patient access specialists work as the first contact with patients visiting a doctor's office or other healthcare settings.

People often come to the doctor with stress or concerns, and the patient access specialist they encounter shapes their experience, calms them down and helps them feel cared for and supported. If you're looking for a role that impacts people and keeps you busy with new tasks every day, a patient access specialist is a fantastic role that can lead to other industry opportunities.

Whether a hospital is in the middle of a significant world health event or working with typical patient volumes, the phlebotomists are one of the many sets of personnel that keep them running smoothly. Phlebotomists take and process blood, which is one of the critical sources of information that helps doctors and their teams to do their work. Too little bloodwork severely restricts diagnoses and treatment. When there aren't enough phlebotomists, these delays in bloodwork can impact the entire hospital, making it harder to treat patients in the ways they need most.

Here are just a few ways in which phlebotomists are part of the life's blood of hospitals.

Medical treatments go through rigorous testing before approval because doctors, patients, and all relevant parties want to know they can rely on those treatments.

Indeed, there are occasional side effects and reasons why someone isn't the right fit for the treatment, but medical professionals must know the exceptions before approving treatments for broader use. So how do they ensure that their clinical trials effectively give them the information they need to rely on the treatments down the road?

One of the significant ways to ensure they collect sound data is through diverse applicants in their clinical research studies. Having applicants from all walks of life helps increase confidence in the treatment's effectiveness across all people. If there are disparities in clinical results, such as different outcomes for one gender versus another, doctors and patients must have that information before opting into the final version of the treatment. Diverse trials can help researchers adjust the formulation and timing of a treatment to create a final protocol that works as well as possible for many people.

The pandemic brought the world of clinical research front and center. It made more people learn about testing new medical treatments ethically and thoroughly. Every health treatment and innovation needs proper testing to understand its complexity and how people from all backgrounds respond to the procedure or medication. Growing treatment options and medical necessity makes clinical research an essential and expanding field.

An excellent example of how clinical research education can help is in the world of research recruitment. Recruiting diverse populations for clinical trials is integral to getting reliable data from the results of such trials. Let's explore how this process tends to occur.

Many people seek a health or wellness professional when they know they need a change. While this could be asking a doctor for a particular medical treatment or procedure, many of us are looking for strategies that improve our day-to-day lifestyles, such as changing our eating habits, movement, or sleep. Lifestyle shifts benefit from not coming with the intense side effects known to accompany some medicines while improving our perceived quality of life, with outcomes like lower stress and the ability to focus on the present as significant benefits.

One of the ways that health and wellness professionals expand their horizons while also becoming teachers of strategies for lifestyle change is through learning more about the benefits of Ayurveda and Yoga. When you study how to be a yoga instructor at Portland Community College in our program that focuses on ayurvedic yoga, you learn a host of strategies for personal improvement to your eating, movement, and breathing. You also gain the perspective to share those lessons with your clients.

One of the main reasons people practice yoga is that it feels better than not practicing yoga. That may seem obvious, but as more and more people try incorporating an Ayurvedic yoga practice into their daily lives, they discover that yoga's benefits are well-documented in scientific studies. Whether you're interested in the benefits of Ayurveda more broadly or are curious about how to learn ayurvedic yoga, Portland Community College's Ayurvedic Yoga health program can provide valuable insights for a variety of healthcare practitioners,  yoga instructors, or other fitness professionals.

Learning the benefits of yoga for health can help you incorporate yoga more intentionally in your own life or recommend yoga more thoughtfully as a healthcare or fitness professional. Here are six of the benefits you might not have known before.

Originally from San Diego, Melinda's first career was in the hospitality industry, working in exciting restaurants on the West Coast. A lifelong home cook, she turned to nutrition studies when chronic health issues left her with more questions than answers.