Is This Too Much For An Ortho Assistant
I work at an orthodontist's office where we see up to ~80 patients - at least 15 patients in my column daily. There are currently three assistants (one recently quit) that I work with, and the manager is constantly adding to our workload. We had a meeting today where she informed us she wants us to use our third-party messaging app to contact our patients every day to ask them how they are feeling and how the appointment went.
Last week we had a meeting where we went over the responsibilities of each employee, such as the front desk, the treatment coordinators, the practice director, and us assistants. It is painfully obvious that we carry the bulk of the daily tasks. We had to write on a large posterboard all of our duties, and what the others do isn't even in the same solar system as the things we are expected to do. As fellow assistants know, there are many things on our plates. For example, things like doing inventory, checking in packages, ordering new Invisalign refinements, ordering appliances, calling the lab if a problem arises, calling patients if a problem arises, maintaining suction lines, cleaning traps, cleaning our workstation, assembling debond gifts, taking records, and juggling a hectic schedule between all 3 of us.
Today we had a meeting with just the assistants and our practice director, (a.k.a. manager) and she told us that she wants us to message each patient every day, checking in with how their appointment went and how they're feeling. If they opted not to sign up for the text messages at their initial consultation appointment. We have to personally call their phone number.I don't know how we're going to find the time to do this in a situation where we constantly have back-to-back appointments with no breaks in between, sometimes we barely get a lunch, and always squeezing in patients who call for a comfort (or those who just walk in expecting to be seen). I don't want to have to stay any longer than we do to reply to messages that we receive from 15+ patients a day.
Do any other offices do such a thing?
SIDE NOTE: my manager stated that she would get my X-ray certification during onboarding, and that was back in August of last year. I brought it up in a meeting with just her and I and she stated that it'll happen, but she doesn't know when... meaning she doesn't have it on her radar. She also said that my pay increase will happen once the X-ray certification class is done, which takes about six months. Does it sound like I'm being taken advantage of?