Tell me about a time when you solved a problem at work or school?
"While working towards my associate's degree, I worked part time as a phlebotomist to help gain as much experience in a hospital setting as I could. I noticed one of my fellow co-workers, who was an experienced employee, wasn't following our safety protocol that called for wearing gloves while drawing blood. First, I spoke to my co-worker directly about why the safety protocol was in place and that I was concerned to see her not following it. She brushed me off and continued. To be fair, I let her know that I'd have to report her non-compliance to our supervisor and she became angry with me. Fully knowing that safety is of utmost importance in healthcare, I went to my supervisor and the issue was resolved through her."
"In my current position, our services were expanded to help cover referrals from other clinics in our area and our patient numbers began to increase right away. Seeing backups in our waiting room and increased patient waiting time, I immediately talked to my manager about a dire need to increase our staffing levels during peak day shift hours. He and I worked together on analyzing data for a week long period and, once compared to prior data, we found that our patient numbers and patient wait times had increased by 30%. A plan to change our staffing was implemented immediately and we ended up posting and hiring another tech to help with the increased need."
Even though your job may seem pretty straight forward, there can be mechanical issues or miscommunication among people that will require your critical thinking abilities. Take some time to think about an example that is relevant. Troubleshooting technical issues would be a great example, as those may be the most common errors you need to research and repair. If you give an example of a miscommunication or technical issue, focus more on what you did to solve the problem than the actual problem itself. Explain the process of identifying the problem and taking the steps to solve it.
"A couple of months ago, I was the only tech working on night shift in our hospital and those shifts solely involve working with hospitalized patients and emergency patients. As I was being called for my first emergency patient for the night, I realized that our CT scanner was showing a technical error and would not start properly. As per protocol, I shut down power to the machine and restarted it, only to find that the error still persisted. Knowing it would be down for a bit, I contacted the emergency physician that ordered the scan to let him know I had to walk through troubleshooting procedures for our CT scanner. Being a night shift, he understood and talked to the patient. Luckily, my quick thinking in contacting the manufacturers technical help line, a technician was able to walk me through the steps to fix the issue in a short amount of time."
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