Medical Secretary

Liverpool

NHS medical secretaries make sure that our frontline staff can dedicate their time to patient care while our personal assistants support our senior leaders.

Working life

As a medical secretary or personal assistant, you’ll usually work for a senior member of staff or group of staff. You’ll support the work of a department by taking on administrative and secretarial tasks. For example:

• Typing
• Arranging meetings and taking minutes
• Managing diaries
• Arranging travel
• Dealing with enquiries
• Taking phone calls
• Ordering stationery
• Dealing with post and emails
• Creating and updating spreadsheets and databases

You could be based in clinical areas such as:

• Hospital departments of all types
• Specialist clinics, including cancer centres or accident and emergency units
• GP surgeries and health centres

You may have contact with patients and their families as well as with healthcare staff and other admin staff.

Personal assistants may also be based in non-clinical areas such as NHS headquarters buildings where there is little or no contact with patients.

Medical secretaries/personal assistants may supervise a team of admin/secretarial staff such as clerks or typists.

Entry requirements, skills and interests

Medical secretaries/personal assistants have usually worked elsewhere in the NHS so they have experience of medical terminology and NHS ways of working.

There are no set entry requirements for a medical secretary/personal assistant. However, employers expect excellent keyboard skills. They may ask for qualifications in typing or word processing. Employers also expect a good standard of literacy, numeracy and IT skills. They may ask for GCSEs or equivalent qualifications. You may be able to enter an apprenticeship through an administrative role and through further training and qualifications, progress to more senior roles as a medical secretary or personal assistant.

They support the work of a department.

Personal characteristics

As a medical secretary or personal assistant, you’ll need to:

• Work accurately and methodically
• Meet deadlines
• Use medical terminology
• Pay attention to detail
• Work in a team but use their own initiative
• Work with all types of people
• Be helpful and reassuring if dealing with patients and their families

Skills required

• Excellent keyboard skills
• IT skills
• Good spelling and grammar
• Organisational skills

Full time (9:00am – 5:00pm)

£10.50 P/H

Both doses of the Covid-19 Vaccine are mandatory in order to be accepted for this role.