receptionist

Cote-St-Luc-Hospital-For-Animals

Overall, this is a decent job if you are looking for medical reception experience - like any clinic, it can get incredibly busy and stressful at times (along with necessary covid protocols that added some extra work), but there are also down times where you can relax a little bit. The most difficult part of the job was managing the high number of phone calls the clinic gets alongside helping clients in person. 

Despite the challenges of this position, I really enjoyed getting to know the majority of the people I work with, both the vet technicians and other receptionists - they were all very friendly and did their best to be helpful even when they were busy. And getting to spend time with animals everyday is a plus. 

The biggest critique I have is with the overall management of the clinic. I did not feel particularly welcomes by the boss and got the impression that others felt the need to tiptoe around them, including me. They definitely seemed to treat the technicians differently than the receptionist and didn't seem to value their reception team. Unfortunately, I found this to have a significant impact on the overall environment of the work place, despite everyone else being lovely. 

I think the main area that needs to be improved is the training of the receptionists. When I first started here, my training involved "shadowing" the two full-time receptionists, occasionally being given simples admin tasks to do, but mostly just watching them and asking them questions. After a few days of this, I felt like I had learned as much as I could from watching them and at that point, the only way I could learn was by doing. Despite this, the shadowing went on for several weeks, and most of the time the receptionists would be so busy that they didn't have time to train me. This is not their fault at all, as obviously they had to prioritize doing their actual job and they were both very friendly despite having way too much on their plate. 

I understand that as a medical clinic, there are certain mistakes that you just can't make and things you can't forget. But what I found contradictory is that during training, it seemed like people didn't want to let me do things like answering the phone or processing payments because they didn't trust that I knew what I was doing. Yet when I got thrown into the job on my own, those were things that I still had to do and didn't feel confident doing because I wasn't adequately trained.

I think this is an excellent animal hospital and there are clearly a lot of people who love the doctors and are incredibly loyal customers. I genuinely want the clinic to succeed, both for the clients and the employees. But once the two full-time receptionists leave, I thing the clinic will have a very difficult time managing unless they figure out a more effective way to properly train people.




The job itself is demanding. It is a busy hospital where you will need to be good at staying composed while juggling multiple phone calls and client needs.
It seems like a straightforward receptionist job: answer calls and check emails, take requests for medication or food, invoice clients, and prepare files for the next day.
But the management was very disorganised. Despite how serious it is to get everything correct and accurate, the training did not adequately prepare me. In fact, it only touched on simple procedures such as file organisation and basic invoicing, and the rest was to figure out, or have a technician hold your hand through something "new" (that should have been included in the training) every week. 
It was not uncommon for the boss to get frustrated with something that was often never mentioned in the first place.

Everyone was amazing, kind, and supportive, but truly, management has no professionalism or respect for receptionists.
There was bad communication on scheduling needs, they were rarely available, and even when they were, they were not easy to speak with. They were often very rude, and it was clear everyone else knew and just shrugged it off. There was also very blalant favouritism that led certain individuals to get their ideal hours, and get away with unprofessional behaviour.

The most enjoyable part of the job was being able to interact with the kind clients, technicians, and the animals, of course.

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