Certified Medical Assistant - Page 2

Best to realize it now:

There are NO guarantees. Not in nursing, not as a Medical Assistant. NONE.

If you will do as advised and read previous threads, you will find many under- and unemployed nurses and Aides. And before you pay for any type of MA training, keep in mind that the training will likely not be worth paying much for. Many physician offices prefer to train their own MA's.

Well, if you want to be a RN, I say go straight for that. It won't get any easier later. If you can, it's best to just go straight for RN.

Or if you *really* feel the need to go for something easier to get into first, I advise LPN over MA. LPNs make more than MAs. And your LPN license can be applied toward getting your RN. Having been a MA won't really count toward anything when it comes to furthering your nursing career.

It wasn't a mean comment; he/she was letting you know that we've had several forums on this issue, so if you use the "search" function, you're more likely to find the most information regarding your question. Please don't go looking for offense when none was likely intended.

I live in California and make $20 an hour as a CMA in a jail. LVN's make $35 and RN's make and average of $50 where I work. Most of my former classmates make $9-$12 as a CMA if they found a job.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket either. If that school is too overwhelmed to give you encouragement regarding acceptance, check out other schools in the area.

Moved to CNA/MA Forum to elicit further response. There are several threads in this forum from others struggling with the same decision.

MA is medical model, generally relegated to an outpatient clinic or physician office. Some states have a defined scope of practice others do not. Training often includes front office tasks such as scheduling and insurance/patient billing that is not a part of nursing or nursing assistant education.

Generally speaking, CNA is one step of the nursing hierarchy. Some people are satisfied with the role of CNA and have no desire to progress to licensed nurse. An LPN can perform all the skills of a CNA and more. RN's can perform all the skills and duties within the scope of the LPN/LVN and more including management and sometimes administrative duties and public/community health.

Good luck. A search of this forum will likely offer a variety of experiences and opinions. Like others said, consider checking out other nursing programs to keep your options open.

In reality the CMA will take you about a year to complete, bare in mind it is a very expensive program.Like previous posts, most of the CMA's are employed in physician's offices, so if you want to work at a hospital, CMA is not the way to go.
Nursing is a long journey filled with lots of studying given the amount of pre-reqs to do and tons of dedication, sacrifices and up's and down's. From your posts you sound like you don't want to do all that work. Unless you feel that way because of how negative the counselor has been. If nursing is your real passion, you will go through with it, not because it is short, long, easy, hard, make less, more money, but because you really want to do nursing for a living. Good luck!

MAs seem more like a hybrid of office worker and lab tech. They dont really do heavy patient care or acute care, and arent really trained for that kind of work, which is what I generally associate RNs with. So I generally dont see MA as a pathway to RN, unlike CNA, which is more closely related to Nursing(hence the name NURSING assistant).