Health unit coordination programs prepare people to work as medical ward supervisors and clerks. Students learn to greet visitors and maintain patient records. They learn to manage their particular unit and supervise other workers.

Have you ever watched a plane take off? If so, you've probably seen the men or women who direct the plane's movement on the ground by waving bright orange wands. Next to an aircraft, those people look awfully small, don't they?

You've also probably seen the vehicles that hitch onto the front of airplanes. Those little vehicles push the huge aircrafts away from the terminal gate and pull them toward the runway. It's as if a mouse were towing an elephant.

Watching these processes, however, makes us appreciate the importance of jobs that might originally have seemed insignificant. In the same way, you may not initially notice a health unit coordinator if you rush to the emergency room. But it's the work of health unit coordinators that ensures, for example, that pregnant patients don't get sent to the X-ray room, or that patient charts don't get filed with employee records.

As a health unit coordinator, you keep the gears of your particular unit running smoothly. Under the supervision of nurses or healthcare administrators, you manage the day-to-day business functions of your unit. You receive and direct visitors. You transcribe medical and nursing orders. You schedule patient appointments and procedures. And you help monitor patients and personnel.

In order to do these things, you study administrative procedures that are relevant to healthcare. You learn how to process the orders of physicians and nurses. You study medical terminology and coding so that you can understand the events happening around you. You also learn how to effectively communicate with people, especially patients who might be upset or healthcare providers who are under a lot of stress.

A few vocational schools and community colleges offer programs in health unit coordination. You can typically earn either a certificate, which takes about one year of full-time study after high school. A common way to learn health unit coordination is to take course work in this area during nursing training.