The Top Skills Needed to Work in the Healthcare Field

view of operating room
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Healthcare is a huge, vast industry in the United States. In other words, the healthcare industry is bursting at the seams with plenty of job openings that need to be filled. Furthermore, the majority of these positions come with perks such as steady pay, fringe benefits, flexible shifts, cool coworkers, excitement, and an invigorating sense of purpose that can only be derived from giving of oneself to help other people make it through their days with big smiles.

In essence, the healthcare field has the capacity to provide extremely good employment opportunities to millions of people in the United States because it is so very enormous. Many people in this country require direct care and other indirect services related to healthcare. Nonetheless, there are a number of top skills that people should either possess or work hard to develop if they are considering a healthcare career.

The following is a list and description of the general skills that are needed in order to be successful in the healthcare industry on a long-term basis. Astute readers should take note that none of these are hands-on procedural skills. After all, a person can be excellent when it comes to performing medical procedures while being totally awful to the people who require those same procedures to be performed on them.

The Top Five Skills Individuals Need For a Career in the Healthcare Industry

  1. Service orientation is a skill that is totally necessary to survive as a healthcare worker on a long-term basis. Service orientation is defined as a mindset that calls upon a person to actively seek ways to provide assistance (a.k.a. service) to others. A major aspect of working in the healthcare field is ensuring the provision of assistance to patients, their families and others. In a nutshell, healthcare workers deliver services to people.
  2. Communication skills are absolutely imperative for working in the healthcare field. Communication skills include verbal communication, which is the act of speaking and voicing things to other people to get one’s points and information across in an effective manner. Communication skills also involve nonverbal communication, which is the act of using body language, gestures, tone of voice, facial expressions, shrugging, eye movement and posture to convey messages.
  3. Observation is the skill of paying attention to and analyzing the behaviors of oneself and others with the ultimate goal of improving or making corrections as needed. Healthcare workers must continually observe their own actions; also, they observe patients, coworkers, supervisors, families, vendors, visitors and an array of other people. Thus, healthcare workers need to have a keen sense of observation.
  4. Active listening skills are very important to have in the healthcare industry. Active listening skills are the series of deliberate actions people take so they will be able to devote complete attention to what other persons are saying. Some examples of active listening skills include taking the time to comprehend the points individuals are attempting to make, questioning others as needed to gain more clarity, and not interrupting conversations at improper times.
  5. Social awareness is crucial when dealing with people as a healthcare worker. Social awareness can be defined as the skill of comprehending and appropriately responding to the reactions of others and their interpersonal struggles, as well as knowing why they may be reacting in that manner. A socially aware healthcare worker remains fully aware of his or her surroundings and correctly interprets the emotions and actions of the multitude of persons that he or she has met.

If you are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, get a healthcare career in as quickly as two weeks at Legacy Healthcare Careers. Train to become a nursing assistant (CNA). Call (682)626-5266 to register for CNA classes at our state-approved school.

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