Administer basic health care or medical treatments
Little of this can be handed to software today.
The documentation around care is highly automatable and that is where the time goes back. The care itself needs physical presence and someone accountable for the outcome, so this work stays where it is.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Direct care and assistance |
| Jobs that do it | 20 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Vertical agents |
| O*NET activity | Assisting and Caring for Others (4.A.4.a.5) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 20 occupations that perform it.
- Conduct most treatment sessions independently, in accordance with the long-term treatment plan and under the general direction of the patient's physician.
- Treat patients for routine physical health problems.
- Provide post-mortem care.
- Insert peripheral or central intravenous catheters.
- Provide patients with direct family planning services, such as inserting intrauterine devices, dispensing oral contraceptives, and fitting cervical barriers, including cervical caps or diaphragms.
- Examine and clean patients' ear canals.
- Give enemas and perform catheterizations, ear flushes, intravenous feedings, or gavages.
- Provide basic patient care or treatments, such as taking temperatures or blood pressures, dressing wounds, treating bedsores, giving enemas or douches, rubbing with alcohol, massaging, or performing catheterizations.
- Insert or remove urinary bladder catheters.
- Perform healthcare-related tasks, such as monitoring vital signs and medication, under the direction of registered nurses or physiotherapists.
- Administer medications or treatments, such as catheterizations, suppositories, irrigations, enemas, massages, or douches, as directed by a physician or nurse.
- Administer traction to relieve neck or back pain, using intermittent or static traction equipment.
- Apply protective coating of fluoride to teeth.
- Help physicians examine and treat patients, handing them instruments or materials or performing such tasks as giving injections or removing sutures.
- Provide emergency first aid to sick or injured animals.
- Administer prescribed medications to animals.
- Provide treatment to sick or injured animals, or contact veterinarians to secure treatment.
- Administer therapeutic medication and advise patron to seek medical treatment for chronic or contagious scalp conditions.
What we would actually use
Nothing in our landscape addresses this work. That is the honest answer rather than a padded list: this activity needs a person present, or a machine rather than a software agent.
Buy nothing for the care itself. The time comes back from the documentation around it, so the stack worth building is the recording one, on the pages for that work.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
Who does this work
20 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Advanced Practice Psychiatric Nurses
- Animal Caretakers
- Animal Trainers
- Audiologists
- Critical Care Nurses
- Dental Assistants
- Hairdressers, Hairstylists, and Cosmetologists
- Licensed Practical and Licensed Vocational Nurses
- Medical Assistants
- Nannies
- Nurse Anesthetists
- Nurse Midwives
- Nursing Assistants
- Personal Care Aides
- Physical Therapist Aides
- Physical Therapist Assistants
- Radiation Therapists
- Surgical Assistants
- Veterinary Assistants and Laboratory Animal Caretakers
- Veterinary Technologists and Technicians
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Administer basic health care or medical treatments”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.