CNA interested in Nurse Informatics

[Natasha A., CNA, LVN]

As a CNA working in a hospital, how can I volunteer learning about informatics? The only background I have with computers is basic microsoft word and I also work at a rehab hospital and use a computer system to look up patients records. I read that I should volunteer in health-medical research?

[ikarus01]

As a CNA working in a hospital, how can I volunteer learning about informatics?

Find out if there is an informatics department in your hospital and see if you can help in any way.

About 5 years ago we were implementing a system in a large hospital and we needed somebody to enter data into a spreadsheet, and also do sorting and a bit of data analysis. Simple stuff, but kind of time consuming. Sent the request to many nursing stations to see if any nurse was interested in helping and nobody volunteered.

A nursing manager volunteered one of the CNA's because we were told this CNA was a computer genius. We gave her some simple data collection/entering tasks and she did them flawlessly and faster than we anticipated.

Her advantage was that she knew excel and MS access so she even wrote her own queries to speed up the tasks we gave her. Next thing you know, she was asked to enter the data in the system, then she was asked to configure some minor stuff and next thing, she was offered a job as a clinical analyst.

Sure, this is not a daily occurrence but the idea is that anything is possible out there.

As far as volunteering in health-medical research, don't think that's going to be as useful.