How Can I Get My First Certified Nursing Assistant Job?
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Free CNA Resume Sample Certified Nursing Assistant Resume
What is a Nursing Assistant?
Nursing assistants, sometimes called nurse aides and geriatric aides, assist licensed nursing personnel in providing nursing care. They work under the direction and supervision of registered nurses (RNs) and licensed practical nurses (LPNs, LVNs) and other medical staff.
In today’s hospitals and extended care facilities, nurse assistants often have more contact with patients that other health care workers do because they perform almost all of the routine patient care.
Nursing Assistant
The nurse assistant is often referred to as the nurse’s “eyes and ears” and help nurses by performing many common tasks:
-respond to patients’ calls and requests
- take patients to operating rooms and to examination rooms
- observing and recording patients’ conditions: monitoring temperature, blood pressure, pulse, respiration rates, etc
-clean rooms , make beds and serve meals
-give massages
-walk patients who need assistant
-help other medical staff by setting up equipment, storing and moving supplies
-observe patients’ physical, mental, and emotional conditions and report that information back to the nurse
-help patients feel comfortable and try to cheer up patients by being friendly
-change dirty sheets and empty bedpans
help patients with personal hygiene which include bathing, dressing, toileting, grooming and diapering patients
-provide care to patients by helping them get into and out of bed
In short, nurse assistants deliver much of the human-touch care that comforts a patient.
Nursing assistants employed in nursing homes are called geriatric aides
In nursing homes, nurse assistants work with the same patients for many years and often build friendship with these patients.
Job opportunities for nursing assistants
Nursing assistants-men, women, retirees
Students are required to be a certified nursing assistant. Students move through the program and test to be a PN then a registered nurse.
Every night, after pulling on her scrubs and heading to work for the night shift, the nursing home aide would start to feel tense. Frail people’s lives would soon be in her hands. Call lights would blink. Alarms would beep. Sometimes she felt too rushed to care for everyone properly.
NEW HAMPSHIRE
New Hampshire Board of Nursing
New Hampshire Aide Registry
NEVADA
Nevada State Board of Nursing
I spend part of my Thursdays teaching math to a class of 14 prospective nursing assistants at the American Red Cross in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My course is one of several in an intensive four-month program, run jointly by the ARC and the Community Learning Center in Cambridge.
