Are their med techs or aides here?Please read

Nurses General Nursing

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Hi. I am being interviewed for a position at a local hospital. I was wondering if anyone could tell me what there duties are?What is the best,worst part of being either a tech or aide?

Thank you

Rhona

I guess I should also have mentioned; my intention, to one day become a nurse.

Rhona

Hi Rhona,

I have worked as a cna for over eight years. I have worked in both nursing home and hospital settings. In a nursing home nurse aids tranfer, feed, take vital signs and help residents with their everyday living skills. The job is very hard and it requires a lot of patience. In a hospital I took vitals and watched for call lights. At the hospital there were more codes and you needed to think very fast. I personally felt more comfortable working in the nursing home. I do not like emergency situations and left when they wanted to cross train the cna's to become critical care aids. I like to have a routine and the nursing home allows you that. However, I wanted nothing to do with nursing as a career. When a nurse would shove the smallest thing on to me I would tell her to do it. A good example is leaving treatments by bed sides. If it wasnt in my job description I wouldnt do it. Other nurse aids enjoyed doing nursing treatments and helping out with duties but not me. I wanted nothing to do with it. I liked the nurse aid side of things and I enjoyed the interaction. I did not mind the dirty work I felt it was a noble job and one that I did well. I have since left the field. Good luck with nursing school.

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Nursing assistant

Thank you so much for your reply. I was afraid my post would never get a response.

Take care

Rhona

I must say all the cna's I see work very hard doing there jobs are you ready for that?

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Have a Blessed and Peaceful Day,

Jami

I am so ready to work hard. I will tell you a little secret, if I can handle working as a housekeeper in a hospital. I can certainly handle a med tech position. My job had me on my feet cleaning for 8 hours, trust me when i say, You haven't done hard work until you have cleaned am surge rooms,or rooms and patient rooms, emptied linen bags filled to overflowing,not one bag but at least 30-40 per shift.replaced all reds(biohazardous waste) usually upwards of 40 or more bags,not to mention having to take the waste out of patients rooms,clean baby beds, cleaned at least 10 bathrooms per shift, cleaned instruments (L@D),cleaned l@d rooms sometime upwards of ten rooms a shift,these rooms complete with bathrooms, vaccumed halls,dusted common rooms,cleaned nurses station and patient kitchen. Then of course you had to sweep and wash all floors in your area, you may also be asked to mop everything if a patient had an accident in their room.(somebody has to clean that up.)It would make a grown person scream,if they had to do all the tasks required of me on an 8 hour shift.in the hospital i worked in housekeeper were also required to repalce all sharp boxes and stock all bathrooms and all linen for each area, this was also done on each shift. My feet and back hurt so bad some days ,it would take three hours just to start to feel better. I am not afraid of hard work at all but I can tell you what. I have never had a job as hard as that housekeeper one. I doubt I will ever have a job that even comes close.I am looking forward to the challenge,I am not sure why i am rambling on about this but maybe it has to do with all the whinning I heard when I was housekeeping. I remember the nurses as they sat(I repeat sat at the nurses station complainning about how hard they were working.) I wished I could have worked so hard.(I got to stand in a little closet of a room called the dirty utility room) I got paid 6.95 per hour I sat only at break time if I was lucky and wasn't needed to mop up something.I would have loved a breakroom where I could sit down. I had to ride the elevator off the floor I worked on to the basement and sit with the other hardworking SOB's that are taken advatage of every minute in a hospital. I would love to see what would happen if the housekeeping staff were to walk out the door? I wonder what the nurses would do then? sorry if this sounds catty but to me working as a med tech is a step up in the food chain. I really look forward to that. Bring on the hard work,I can't wait.

Rhona

You know Rhona-there is hard physical work and hard mental work. I have done both, and believe it or not, both leave you just as exhausted. The difference is, the nurses have RESPONSIBILITY and EDUCATION, which housekeeping does not. Now we need housekeeping just as much as we need nursing, but remember-I can do YOUR job, you can't do MINE. When your shift is done you leave-I often work an hour or more for free while charting-but I admit I am sitting down! If I make a mistake, i can kill someone-so can a med tech by the way.

My point is you need an attitude adjustment. You have no idea how hard nurses work. In most units nurses have no time to sit and no time for breaks-but of course we do sit when charting. That is still work, work that takes education and experience. I personally don't believe in med techs-there is much more to medication administration than simply handing someone a cup of little pills. Only the uneducated think that's all it takes. Well if you don't know what you are doing you can KILL someone with those pills-and belive me a 2 week course teaches you NOTHING more than to match the pill name on a medication record to the pill name on a bottle and give it to the patient. You don't know why you are doing it, you don't know what pills interact, you don't know what is an overdose or what to do if you give one to the patient.

If you want to one day become a nurse I suggest you take the nurses' assistant job. That will give you the most experience. But LOSE the attitude. Don't take advice from chili-she has a poor attitude toward nurses. And someday if you ever become a nurse, you will look back on your words here and CRINGE!

RNPD

I was going to put up this big long winded post about how us lowly housekeepers, aides and techs are a vital part of the hospital setting but then I realized the source and I know it would waste my breath. I can see by your post that you are exactly the nurse that I would nver want if I were sick. You cannot see the value in everyone and the abilities of thsoe lowly people. Good luck to you in life and I hope that what goes around comes around and maybe you will be blessed by pushing a broom. lol

Rhona

Rhona,

I do not think that a nursing chat room is the best place to voice your negative opinions of nurses. If you think all we do is sit and pass a few meds, I challenge you to go to college for 4 years and come work with us for just one shift. I think you would change your opinions. I agree with RNPD, we have all emptied the trash and mopped a floor, but until you have walked a shift in our shoes please keep your opinions of nurses to yourself.

Oh I disagree here. The best way to find out just what happens in the real world is too experience it. I have lived more life than most of you. I have seen more life than you can possibly read in your textbooks. An education is a fine thing but it does not replace life experience and that my friends I have alot of. I have seen it all. I think i have hit the perverbial nerve here ,if I am not mistaken. Just what upsets you? the facts as seen by one of the lowly? Wake up, and grow up. thsi is not a game of who is superior. It is about patient, it is about people. I can tell you that the lowly tech igves more patient care than the RN sitting there pushing paper. that my forends is the real world. If you want to care for patients then become an aide, if you wnat to push paper then spend four years in college, Who in there right mind would waste their money? Good question isn't it. The reality is this,who is giving the bed baths? Who is ambulating? Who is talking with the patinets and holding their hands? who is doing the caring? Enough said .I will do what I will do ,whether it be become a nurse or be a med tech or go back to a wonderful career of pushing a broom. I can honestly say that when i sit down to a meal in the cafeteria ,you can bet there is noone I will refuse to sit with. Can all of you say the same?

Rhona

oops many apologies for the typos,I didn't realize they were there,oh well,none of the superior nurses who have posted on this topic should be surprised. It must be my total lack of educatin, and my hand bein too long in a buket of diefecent...lol

Rhona

Rhona-YOU are the one who stated your intention to become a nurse. If it is such a waste of time, education, and money, WHY would you say that? What makes you think you have lived longer than I or that your life experiences taught you more than mine did me, or that i too have not seen a lot of life. I never called you ignorant, I never said you were beneath me. Only that if your attitude is that nurses whine about how hard they have it while they sit around all day, then my advice to you was to lose the attitude, or you would never make it in the health care profession working with people instead of brooms. I have & still do give plenty of bedbaths, ambulate patients daily, and most certainly talk with the patients and hold their hands, plus all of the other tasks and responsibilites that a nurse has daily. I AM doing the caring! And if you check out the 4th line of my first post, you'll notice that I stated we need housekeeping as much as nursing-and I'll go on record here to say that we need ALL the departments you mentioned in your post. A hospital of today could not function without them. But nursing historically filled ALL these jobs, long before medical care became so technical and now people who are sicker and sicker are able to be treated and made well. Today, we have no time to do it all, but we still could, if need be

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It really makes me laugh that people who have no clue what we do have such an opinion on it. You insult me when you say that I would not sit at a table with you. I have news for you-my last job, which i was in for over 5 years, had an extremely close group of people from the head nurse to the nurses, nursing assistants, secretaries, transporters and housekeepers assigned to our floor. Once a month we went out for dinner, or to someone's house for a get together. I really miss that gang, but after 7 years have lost touch with all but 3 of them. One is an RN, one is the secretary, and the 3rd one-you guessed it-is Angie the housekeeper!

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