CNA course description and information.

I can only tell you about my CNA course. It was 9 weeks long meeting 2 times a week with a few saturday classes thrown in. We had a small classroom located in the basement of a large skilled nursing facility where we had lecture and a lab with hospital beds and manniquins where we practiced skills. Class time was split pretty much 50/50 between lecture and practice. We had homework assignments from our book that consisted of answering questions, and we had to do a couple presentations during the class. In addition we had 20 hours of clinicals done at the skilled nursing facility. We also had quizzes and written exams that covered the material.

I thought the class was fun thanks to the fact so much of it is hands on. The lab stuff was pretty laid back and people usually laughed and joked around a lot. The emphasis was always on being kind and compassionate and enjoying ourselves and doing everything we could to cheer up our patients and keep them happy. We had an awesome RN instructor who had decades of experience as an LPN and RN in hospitals and nursing homes and was a DON at a facility before becoming a full time teacher. She was extremely strict when it came to things like vital signs and would check us repeatedly on things like taking blood pressure throughout the course, to the point we had sore arms from having cuffs inflated so many times.

For clinicals our instructor made sure we had hard assignments with tough patients who were total care, hard to transfer and often required lifts, so we got lots of practice on the real thing, which is important because working as a CNA is an extremely hard job when you start out. If you can do well in CNA school your first semester of RN clinicals should be easy as most of the students in my class went on to RN school and did their clinicals at the hospital I worked at and they were way more prepared than the non CNA students.

Also be aware that while CNA school is easy, the practical exam isnt as you are likely to get an RN testing you who is a perfectionist and sees themselves as the defender of the profession and will fail a student at the drop of the hat.

Over all I think its great training and should be required of EVERY RN. I even think EMTs and Paramedics should be required to take CNA school because its helped me tremendously in EMS, as most of my patients are old and frail. I've worked in health care for 5 years now and still routinely fall back on some of the things I learned in CNA school, even when I'm working in an ICU as a tech.