Odd Jobs: Clinic Manager

Posted by Tera Wozniak Qualls, Program Coordinator in the Nonprofit Leadership Institute at the Johnson Center for Philanthropy in Grand Rapids, MI. Read more from Tera Qualls and Sam Davidson on Sam Davidson's blog. Follow Tera on Twitter.

This is the second blog post in the series titled “Odd Jobs”. The focus of “Odd Jobs” is to shed light on nonprofit careers that aren’t thought of as the traditional nonprofit job.

In my first blog post, I talked about the Community Engagement Specialist. Today, I would like to explore the job of the Clinic Manager.

There is a diverse array of jobs available in the health field; some positions are for for-profit entities, while others are for nonprofit entities. Clinics are typically nonprofit, and provide medial assistance to individuals that cannot afford to receive traditional medical help. Clinics are sometimes even sponsored by a for-profit hospital in the same community to serve the underserved population.

Clinic managers, whose main job is to keep the clinic running, typically have degrees in health administration, but more often then not, while they maybe providing patient care and direction to physicians, they are also navigating the nonprofit environment. Clinic managers are charged with keeping their clinics open and may be participating in traditional nonprofit duties, such as fundraising, grantwriting, and program development.

The position of a Clinic Manager really mirrors a lot of nonprofit jobs in which the organization provides a more traditional for-profit service at a subsidized rate to the community. Other organizations like this may be community blood centers, nonprofit run vet offices or humane societies, therapy centers, art galleries, and others providing fee for servic

Here is a general job description for a Clinic Manager from the University of Texas Health and Science Center at San Antonio.