A certified nursing assistant is a medical employee who works with doctors and nurses in medical environments and care facilities. They do things like checking vital signs of patients and helping with things like bathing and feeding. They work with medical equipment, setting it up and checking it. They change bedpans and sheets. They are also at the front lines of checking and maintaining a patient’s mental and emotional state.
There are a lot of great reasons to become a CNA. One example is the strongly held belief that fully qualified nurses who started out as nursing assistants just tend to make better nurses. Being able to start out on the ground level gives you the patient-based perspective you need to be a great RN.
CNAs are an important part of any medical team these days, even within teams that don’t just include nurses. They provide a lot of base level routine care operations that free nurses up to help with more involved work. CNAs are great at not only helping with hands on procedures, but also with being the front line workers who keep track of each patient’s physical and mental condition. Nurses are often overburdened, and often can’t spend enough time with patients to get a good feel for how they are doing. This is where CNAs can really shine in monitoring patient’s well-being and helping to improve it.
While they have a wide variety of duties, they do have certain standard job descriptions. At the most basic level, the CNA provides basic nursing services while being supervised by a fully trained RN or LPN. They need to be supervised, as they do not have the legal abilities that a fully registered nurse has.
Their official duties involve taking care of patient grooming, bathing, feeding and hygiene, observing patient’s mental and physical well-being, checking and noting vital signs, moving and transporting patients around the facilities, and other ground level procedures. They are needed and helpful members of any medical facility that engages in long-term or resident care.
By Rita Hayward
