Of course, no worries, I greatly appreciate your help. My role in volunteering included outpatient discharge, as in transporting patients to their rides, which I plan to focus on the most as it involved the most direct patient interaction, as well as the general hospital volunteer gig you'd expect to see, like cleaning beds and units, dressing beds, asking patients if they'd like water or snacks, simple things like that. I would never say I overstepped any boundaries with patients, only doing what was necessary and allowed by the hospital (for reference, it's a large university hospital in my area that had a rather serious onboarding process and clearly stated what is allowed and what is not). My role as a PCA is involved with a single fellow student here at my university. As you said, it is focused on different things on each day, but what I do mainly is administering feeding and medication as well as toileting. That's not to say I haven't picked up shifts which involve other interactions, like dressing, showering, getting ready for bed, and learning to use new instruments whenever necessary (for example, a machine that clears the lungs when exposed to smoke).
Edit: When I say personal care assistant, I do not mean working under a physician, I mean working as a caregiver to a person with a disease who requires caregivers. Im not sure if im misreading your final paragraph, but I am not affiliated with any physician, but rather employed under the family through their insurance.
Got it.
In my experience (which I am not claiming is absolute "Truth" by any stretch of the imagination) is that, typically, what admissions prefers to see is some active collaboration as part of the medical team itself. The idea is that you are participating within the context of a "medical visit," not so much working around it.
Because, in medicine, roles are so clearly defined, the kinds of roles at the entry-level that would allow for that kind of patient interaction are very limited. That's why you see every applicant coming in with scribing, MA, CNA, PCT, or EMT experience. Outside of those roles, the possibility of patient contact that would fit the above definition are very unlikely, not necessarily because a person cannot physically administer an injection on someone else, for example, but because it would be improper or unethical given scopes of practice. These rules exist because, in a clinical environment, the public places trust in institutions to ensure that the people they are working with are adequately credentialed and trained to do the work they do.
Physicians, the medical schools that create them, and the institutions that employ them have a vested interest in protecting that trust (or should).
I can understand that it might feel unfair to hear, at the point of applying, that you must necessarily have x, y, z experience in order to apply, and that no other experiences "count," especially if there is no written requirement anywhere. I don't want you to feel like the last few years were a total waste. But there is a certain amount of risk in not conforming, especially when this process is comparative by design.
What I feel I'm writing circles around is saying plainly that your experiences
may be interpreted more graciously than I'm predicting here (or not). That part I can't say for sure. What I
can say for sure is that they will probably not be as easily interpretable as an MA job for example, which carries fairly uniform expectations. I do think there are reasonable questions to be asked about whether you have an understanding of what you are truly stepping into.
That's not a personal judgment, but it's a very likely question an evaluator would make... and again, without your full application, I can't tell if you have a compelling response to that. This is one of those things that an evaluator cannot just take you at your word for. It has to be materially supported by your experiences.
But let me not get too ahead of myself. I just hope this doesn't land as a shock.
