health unit coordinator?....

secretary

I've been doing it for five years. Finally just got my CNA. It's a good intro into health care, and might allow you to move up in the career field easier than someone off the street.

Don't they basically run the entire ward? I thought about taking a unit coordinator class but A) I'm a male and B) I wasn't sure if I had an aggressive enough personality to function in that kind of a job.

LOL. As a matter of fact, they do "run" the ward, and typically the doctors and nursing staff realize and appreciate that. Upper management, however, not so much.

Most of the unit clerks/ward clerks/unit secretaries/unit coordinators (we have many monikers) are women at my facility, but that has less to do with their aggressive work styles and more to do with the whole "secretary" stereotype. I wish there were more men doing this job. Maybe we'd all make more money.

Basically you have to have good clerical and computer skills, plus medical terminology, HIPAA regs, be super organized and play nice with others. There are always people, no matter what setting you work in, who think that secretarial types are the low person on the totem pole. So you have to be able to deal with that without letting it get to you. But that's nothing that CNA's aren't accustomed to either.