Dr. Mandal

I share a medical assistant with the dermatologist at the office. We recently hired someone new to work for us. She just started working a week ago.

Everyone has a different work ethic. I’m a multi-tasker, although it works for me, I don’t necessarily think it is the most efficient way to work.  I’ve worked with people who like to do one thing at a time. I don’t necessarily care what style a person has…bottom line is to get the job done.

Today the medical assistant directly asked me if there was anything that she was doing that she could do better. I was pleasantly surprised. Not many people are conscientious enough to think of asking. Although it hadn’t entered my mind to ask before, it prompted me to ask her if there was anything on my part that I could do better. We both agreed that direct communication is key to a good working relationship.

As a business person and physician, one of my challenges is to be an effective communicator. In residency, I didn’t necessarily like asking my interns to do the scut work. Sometimes it was faster and easier to just do the job myself. I’m learning though that you can’t do everything and it’s important to learn how to delegate tasks. So my goal for the next few months is to be able to assign more responsibilities to other people to allow myself the time to be what I am, a physician.  Why don’t they teach this kind of stuff in medical school? And yes Aleyda, I’ll get some filing cabinets soon