Urgent care work has become one of the most populated areas of the medical field over the last few decades. Knowing how to impress interviewers who are recruiting quality urgent care workers for positions all around the country will help you achieve your dream of working in an urgent care facility. If you’re looking to land a solid urgent care position, you’ll need to ensure your interview skills and resume are top-notch. If you’re not sure where to start, here are eight resume items that urgent care workers must list on their resumes:
1. Excellent Communication Skills
Communication skills are a must-have for any person within the medical profession – but it’s especially important for urgent care workers. Urgent care facilities are much busier than your typical family practice but not nearly as hectic as hospitals. This mid-level chaos requires you to be on top of all the information you’re communicating to your patients and fellow medical workers.
2. Being Able to Self-Direct
Given the more urgent environment of urgent care, there’s often not a lot of downtime where higher-ups can give you directions. Due to this, you need to excel at self-direction. It’s up to the entire urgent care team to keep procedures and workloads smooth, and without a mixture of excellent teamwork and self-direction, the workflow can quickly become corrupted. Self-direction also applies to choosing the urgent care job of your dreams, and you can quickly search for quality urgent care jobs on Practice Match.
3. Previous Urgent Care Experience
Without prior urgent care experience, you may struggle to get urgent care work over candidates with prior experience. However, it’s still worth applying to urgent care positions even if you have no prior urgent care experience. After all, everyone has to start somewhere, even in the busy world of the medical field.
4. An Ability to Learn on the Job
Continuous education is a key part of every medical job. Science does not stop progressing, so your medical education can never truly be final. CME (continuing medical education) is often a huge part of every medical job for this reason. If your resume demonstrates your ability to effectively and quickly learn on the job, you’ll become a much stronger candidate.
5. Patient Education Skills
One of the most important, and most challenging, aspects of medical work is educating patients about their health, afflictions, treatment plans, and other medical needs. Patient education requires a lot of patience, and the ability to make sometimes highly complex information understandable to someone with no medical education or training. Given the nature of urgent care work, having stellar patient education skills becomes that much more important.
6. Medication Management
Throughout your day-to-day job as an urgent care worker, you’ll need to administer a lot of medication. Even a small mistake when giving medication can cause serious damage (and even death). Due to this, you need to have stellar medication management skills when working in urgent care. Medication management often includes other forms of treatment as well. Thankfully, the extensive training you’ve received in medical school will ensure that you can easily and quickly handle medication management tasks on the job.
7. Outpatient Care Experiences
Similar to hospitals, some urgent care facilities have outpatient care clinics or tents set up to decrease traffic, and to help prevent the spread of diseases. If you’ve worked in an outpatient setting before, you’ll have a much better job at landing a quality urgent care position. Even if you have not worked in an outpatient setting, you can list skills that will demonstrate your ability to adapt to an outpatient setting.
8. Knowledge of Emergency Medicine Practices
Lastly, you must understand how to administer medicine during emergencies. Since these situations are much more intensive and time sensitive, this skill differs from the medication management skill that we discussed earlier on. Having experience in this area of medicine is critical for protecting patients that might suddenly have a serious (or even potentially deadly) medical emergency while under your care at the urgent care. If you include this skill on your resume, you will quickly stand out from urgent care worker candidates that failed to do so.
Having a Quality Resume is Urgent
To land your dream urgent care position, it’s urgent that you perfect your resume. Thankfully, if you add these eight must-have items to your resume, you’ll easily stand out from other urgent care worker candidates. Once you’ve landed the medical job of your dreams, you’ll be glad you took the time to carefully edit and finesse your professional resume.
