Certified nursing assistants, or CNAs are very important. We know that there is an enormous demand for these workers all over the country. But what do they do?

Here are some common tasks that CNAs accomplish for patients as they support an overall care plan. 

Medications

Many patients need someone to help them take medications on a schedule and ensure the dosage is correct.

Without this assistance, people often suffer from ‘med errors’ where they take the wrong dosage, confuse pills, or fail to adhere to a therapeutic schedule.

So CNAs will be responsible for ‘med deliveries’ or ‘med checks’ and will manage their patient schedules accordingly.

Treatment Data

CNAs are also on the front line of delivering treatment data to physicians or people involved in a patient’s care plan.

As they are working with patients daily, they can identify data points needed in the patient’s chart and send them on to clinical evaluators. This is inevitably going to have an impact, either positive or negative, on their care according to the CNA’s expertise and accuracy. 

Hygiene

CNAs will often help to dress patients or prepare them for the day in the morning. This sort of life assistance sits in the junction between helping to care for chronic disease or disability and enhancing the capabilities of people with impairments.

Meals

Meals are incredibly important to any patient, but so is nutrition. So in a dual sense, CNAs are helping to deliver meals and food to patients. Still, they’re also looking at the nutrition involved in their diet and helping them to make choices that can determine their health in the future. That alone provides an example of how important CNA work is. 

CNAs and Per-Diem or Short-Term Work

Opening up more flexible schedules for CNAs and other medical professionals helps streamline community care.

Healthfirst Staffing helps with placement and scheduling for short-term CNA work.

 How does this work? First of all, we have resources for employers and candidates to help with both sides of this process.

In another blog post, we talked about the development process of matchmaking, where you tailor one person’s need to another’s, or in this case, one person’s need to the need of an industry or employer.

For employers, we have a dynamic set of broad services that help them to find different kinds of talent for their healthcare offices.

For candidates, it’s a little bit different. We help with resumes and other elements of the process to get them closer to their personal goals while also helping them to fit into the healthcare industry where it suits them best.

And isn’t that what you need in any industry: a good matchmaking capability to match people to tasks and roles?

Check out our seven sins of our e-book online, and get help for practical healthcare solutions.