Duties of a Certified Nursing Assistant

A certified nursing assistant (CNA) is a trained professional providing basic care for patients and who are a support staff for the nurses that are in:

• Hospitals
• Continuing care facilities
• Rehabilitation clinics
• Doctor’s offices

The job is something that can require you to be able to lift patients, definitely great people skills, sense of humor and the ability to tolerate cleanup and caring for people that can’t fully take care of themselves. Sometimes it’s a thankless job that requires you to remember the good you really are doing for people.

You could be called a healthcare worker though most stick with the nursing assistant designation. A nursing assistant is going to go through a program that could be offered through a medical school, college or a technical school. There are other programs that are done through other organizations like the Red Cross for one example.

Training will be anywhere from just a few weeks up to a few months or so dependent upon the specific program that you go through. The classes are most usually taught by registered nurses. Almost all nursing assistant jobs are going to require some certification so you would go about getting that through gaining that certification by participating and passing the exams in the class.

 A certified nursing assistant is going to assist patients with the basic human needs in the healthcare profession. They might help to feed or bathe a patient, change beds and diapers, empty out bedpans and help the patients to the bathroom or toileting facilities.

The certified nursing assistant is also trained to take vitals. Vitals are the measurements of:

• The pulse
• The blood pressure
• The respiration

They are responsible for doing this several times during each of their shifts. They are trained and must stay aware of any changes in vitals as well as any other significant changes in the patients overall condition and report this to the nursing staff immediately.

In the long term care facilities it’s usually going to be the nursing assistant, sometimes getting the help of the orderlies, will help turn the patients over every couple hours or so to makes sure that they aren’t developing bedsores. Often the nursing assistant is going to be the first response when a patient needs and calls for help. The job is something that can require some heavy lifting to be done when a patient is ill or recovering and can’t get up on their own, change their clothes or go to the bathroom by themselves. So with that said it obviously requires some physical strength and the knowledge of how to lift safely.

There might be some nursing assistants that are asked to give some additional support to the patients through helping them with their physical or respiratory therapy. In the long term care facilities the nursing assistant might be asked and trained to help the patients that are in a coma or paralyzed to exercise. They might also get a position working with patients in a home setting and could be the main caretaker for a patient that is recovering or has a long term disabling condition.

There are many different jobs that the nursing assistant can do and their jobs can free up the time of the nurses to provide the assistance to patients that require more technical training and knowledge like the IV, staring and administering drugs, medication dosages, charting and seeing and noting the significant changes in a patient’s condition and then alerting the doctor to any potential problem.

The unfortunate reality is that in many of the care settings today the patient to nurse ratio is way too high and is something that can be helped and somewhat resolved by the skilled certified nursing assistant. When the ratio is high it can be exhausting work but you provide significant help and although sometimes it might seem like a thankless job it is highly personally rewarding. What you do and the people that you help are real.