A Request Outside the Role

In practice

Late on a Friday, a patient waiting for the provider points to a dark spot on her arm and asks the medical assistant, "Does this look like cancer to you?" The medical assistant has seen many moles, and this one looks ordinary to her. She still does not answer the question. Instead she says, "That is a good question for the provider. I will let her know you want her to look at it," and she adds a note to the record so the concern is not lost. A few minutes later, a busy coworker asks her to give a vaccine injection to a patient in the next room. She has watched injections given but has not yet been trained and checked off on them in this practice, and the practice's policy requires that check-off. She tells her coworker plainly that she has not been checked off yet and cannot take the task, and the coworker finds a trained colleague. Both requests were reasonable from the person asking. Both fell outside what this medical assistant was allowed to do at that moment, one because it called for clinical judgment, the other because the practice's training requirement had not been met.