Pros
Working as a personal assistant with physicians and getting the chance to be where the action is, watching everything the doctors, nurses, lab techs, and ER techs do. You get to see a variety of cases and in many instances interact with patients, though you aren't allowed to touch the patients. Your job is to observe and document. I'm certain you experience more working as a scribe than you would as a first year medical student. I am very grateful to have had this job! Personally, I worked in an ER so it is very fast paced and stressful with a large influx of patients nearly every shift. You get to pick your schedule a month in advance and they work around your school schedule as many employees are still in school. You are only required to work a minimum of 2 shifts a week and if something comes up and you can't make it to your shift, coworkers at time do pick up the shift for you, however don't rely on that too heavily. My comments on overtime below may not apply to people who work for this company at private practices or other medical facilities other than emergency rooms. If you are proficient at your job and leave a good impression on the physicians, you may find yourself some excellent references and even letters or recommendation if you plan on attending med school, PA school, other healthcare related work, etc.
Cons
You are paid very little for the high stress job you have. You start out minimum wage and with time perhaps you can get a raise of 25 cents an hour. If you apply to become a trainer that may increase to a dollar an hour. There is no certainty as far as when you will get off work. If the ER is crowded and you have 50 charts to finish, count on staying overtime. There is no telling when you'll have to miss out on something because you must stay late at work. If you do not finish everything, you risk upsetting the doctor and leaving them at a loss because they are missing information on their patients. It astounds me that as scribes we are expected to learn how to write and think like a doctor, and the doctors' legal standing is in our hands, however we are compensated very little for what we do. Apparently physicians must pay $20-$30 per hour to have a scribe, however the actual scribes only see $10 of that (I'm referring to California only, as the minimum wage in other states is even lower!). At times you get angry emails from managers for not performing hospital tasks that are not in your job description (i.e. filling out hospital survey's that hospital administration asks the physicians to do) and if you forget to do the surveys after seeing 50 patients you are hounded and threatened with disciplinary action by site managers who don't even bother attending the quarterly meetings.
