Bridging Boundaries

  President's Message

By Pati AR Howard, CMT, AHDI-F 

One definition for determination is “the power or habit of deciding definitively and firmly.” My husband’s personal credo is “don’t be defeated, be determined.” That may be a worthy philosophy for us all to embrace.

Most of us “old salts” MTs have a ‘tale of woe’ or two to share with the “up and comers” in the MT profession. I subscribe to the theory that anything worth having is worth working for, and I have my own battle scars from the past when I first started out as a medical transcriptionist. Even though I had completed more than half of my nursing training (thus I had a good deal of anatomy as well terminology knowledge), it only served as the foundation upon which I could build to become a capable MT. I can specifically recall one evening of struggle when I could not understand a mush-mouthed, slurring dictator whirling through a litany of symptoms in a review of systems paragraph. The hopelessness and helplessness I felt as he spoke terms, (which now come easily) which I simply could not parse, gives me empathy for anyone starting out in the profession ~ it is not an easy journey.

I had other skills, as well as other interests, and am certain I could have found a job, taking a different direction, and ended up satisfied. For some reason, I became determined that my lack of skill or ability to successfully transcribe this particular dictator ~ or any dictator ~ was not going to defeat me. At the time I only had a Stedman’s Dictionary. There was no internet, no one to call to “listen to a word,” and no professional organization of medical transcriptionists.

Currently, new MTs and MT students have a different set of circumstances than I did back in the late 1970s. There are resources available now which I did not have (mentioned above), but the career field still remains a challenging one. Medicine is not a static field of science; all of us need to continually educate ourselves on new methods, terms, equipment, requirements, etc.  We need to remember what piqued our interest about becoming an MT to begin with, to recapture the enthusiasm for the profession, and not to become defeated, but to become determined.