What is a STNA (State Tested Nursing Assistant)?
If you’re interested in working closely with patients, nursing actually might not be the way to go. Instead, you could consider becoming a nursing assistant – the “eyes and ears” of the nursing world.
A state tested nurse’s assistant (STNA) is a person who assists medical patients with daily activities including providing bedside care, such as basic nursing procedures. An STNA can also be referred to as a Patient Care Assistant (PCA) or a Nursing Assistant (NA), but the job is the same regardless of the title or association.
Nursing assistants are important to the medical system because they perform routine procedures that would otherwise double a regular nurse’s daily responsibilities. These procedures include formulating care plans, administering medication, assisting with operating room preparation, and handling nursing assessments. Nursing assistants must be conscientious and responsible enough to handle these tasks with little to no direct supervision, but they must also be willing to work directly below their resident nurse.
As a prospective nursing assistant, you will need various essential skills including the ability to assess a patient’s condition accurately and report on it, and the ability to effortlessly perform the procedures required to sustain or assist the patient. These procedures may include ambulation (helping patients walk), Bedpan use and output measurement, oral care, dressing, feeding, nail care, oral care, bed bathes, serving water, positioning, range of motion exercises, and measuring vital signs.
Nursing assistants are required to be the “eyes and ears” of regular nurses, maintaining patients and leveraging the Nurses’ responsibilities. In addition, they must be able to stay calm in emergency situations, and be able to respond to a “Code Blue” (cardiac arrest). In addition, nursing assistants must be certified in CPR.
Nursing assistants are a vital part of the medical system and a great asset to nurses and patients alike. On average, a nursing assistant in the USA makes around $24,000, or about $14 hourly. If you want to be closer to patients when entering the medical field, assistant nursing is definitely the way to go.
