Starting out as a Nursing Assistant?

There is a CNA/MA forum under the Nusing Student forum with lots of discussions on the topic of CNA experience r/t nursing.

Try Drug Calculations Made Incredibly Easy. This will help you with the dimensional analysis method of dosage calculation.

Good luck!

So I am very excited to begin my nursing career to become an LPN, but I am very nervous. I will be taking a CNA course so I can get the hang of things.. Has anyone started out as a CNA and moved up to an LPN? if so how was it? Also I never did well in math, and I know that one of the major math studies in Nursing School is Drug dosages and calculations, so I've been studying. Any advise for an aspiring Nurse? Thanks[/quote']

Yeah like Boogalina said, go under the cna/ma forum you will see over a million forums on this lol.

I used to be a PCT/CNA and now an LPN. Being a cna helped me as far as clinicals/patient care, if I needed to work during nursing school I could have did hha and found a job to work around my schedule, and it helped out with nursing fundamentals a little. Some nursing schools want you to be a cna to apply to their school and or will up your chances of getting in.

As far as the nursing part such as med surg and pharm, cna did not help. Good Luck

Where I live you have to get your CNA before you can apply to the LPN program. But CNA is a piece of cake

I will echo the others here - being an aide helped me with the clinicals part of my education. I already worked daily in a hospital caring for patients, so clinicals were a breeze for me and I was right in my element. Some of the other nursing stuff tho it really doesn't help you with - you have to sort of forget about the CNA stuff when you are studying for your NCLEX and think like a nurse would for example

I actually just got a job as an LPN after graduating back in June, and when I started the program about a year and a half ago, I really wished I would have become a CNA first. It gets you comfortable with basic patient care (which is primarily what you do along with basic nursing tasks at the start of school). I was nervous to transfer, change briefs, toilet them, etc. Of course I got comfortable with it the more I was around them, but it would have helped. My classmates who were in the same boat as me agreed that the ones who were CNAs definitely were more comfortable. Good luck!

It's not required where I live, and one of my nursing instructors told everybody, on the first day of class, that CNAs are great for what they do, but the students who were CNAs need to remember they don't know nursing.

It's not required where I live, and one of my nursing instructors told everybody, on the first day of class, that CNAs are great for what they do, but the students who were CNAs need to remember they don't know nursing.

This is soo true. Some of the CNA's in my class thought they knew everything and it was soo annoying. I knew what I knew and if I didn't know something I sat back and had my pie hole closed.

Being a cna is helping me through school, I work in the hospital so I'm exposed to a lot, gained a lot of experience. I'm always applying something I've learned with something I've seen or did at work. Make sure you aim to work in a hospital if you become a cna first, the experience there is far greater and more useful than in a nursing home when it comes to gaining medical knowledge. I never worked in a nursing home but in the first clinical of my program we are in a nursing home and I see what the cnas there do and in my opinion the exposure and ability to pick up useful knowledge is limited.

Thanks! Im not even a CNA yet, and Im trying to see about getting a hospital job. I know that it will help a lot

To become an LPN will be a good idea for a start. [email protected]. We can share more.