I have a friend who is getting her degree and planning to enter nursing school. I suggested she could get a job now as a nursing assistant so she could earn money and that it would help her when she eventually did get her nursing degree. She said that she has been told by several friends of hers who are nurses that she shouldn’t do this, that if she worked in a nursing home or the like that hospitals would be disinclined to hire her later after getting her degree.
This does not make sense to me. Is this true? If so, why?
Well, it depends. Nursing home nursing can be very different from hospital nursing. If you’ve worked in a nursing home for 10 years and try to get a job as an ER nurse, then you may get passed over for someone with more relevant experience. It’s not that your friend would be forever tainted from working in the nursing home, it’s just that she’d have a different type of experience to bring to her next job, compared to nurses applying to the position who have only ever worked in a hospital setting.
Working SNF also tends to be far more slow paced and focused very differently. The mindsets and attitudes of folks drawn to long term care is going to be very different than those of an ER or Labor & Delivery nurse who spends all day flying by the seat of their pants. An RN at a SNF is more like a manager of a floor dealing with small problems and changes of 50-60 patients with a team of 8-10 LVN’s and CNA’s working under her compared to an ICU nurse managing 2 critical patients with barely a fingerhold on life and very technically challenging needs to be managed on a minute to minute basis.
They are very different working environments, and they tend to attract different types of people. I could very much see a hospital being hesitant to hire someone who was drawn to SNF instead of acute care.
It is, literally, impossible to answer this question with any kind of authority. I’ve learned to ignore the older nurses when they say stuff like this. Today’s hiring market is not the same it was 5 years ago, much less 15 years ago. Today’s hiring market in Chicago is nothing like the hiring market in Seattle is nothing like the hiring market in Peoria.
MY advice, based on my experiences in the last couple of years (graduated 2011) in Chicago is to get a CNA job anywhere you can anywhen you can - if you’re a decent student and can handle a job while you’re working. Nursing is like most professional fields: the more people in your field you know, the better your chances of getting an interview. Being a kick ass CNA will often (but not always) get you RN job offers from your company when you’ve got your license. While CNA experience does not replace RN experience on a resume, it does introduce you to a lot of people who can help you get a job - not always at the same place you know them from. Many nurses work at more than one place, and will give you a recommendation at their other job if they’re hiring. It also gets you practice with patient contact and allows you to familiarize yourself with medical equipment, medical jargon and the unspoken, unwritten mores of the culture.
Again, this only works if you can handle a job and school, and handle them both well. You’ve got to be a GOOD CNA for this to help, and if you’re dragging yourself through your shift whining about your next exam, you’re probably not going to win yourself a great reputation and have people call in favors for you. If you’ve got a family and you honestly can’t handle a job *and *school, then just focus on school.
Educate yourself about the New Grad programs at hospitals if you want to work a hospital, and do it a year *before *you graduate. My school didn’t tell us that these programs exist, much less that we needed to apply 6 or 12 months before graduation - even though they made us take a class in how to get a job in nursing. There were at least two programs that would have been ideal for me that I didn’t learn about until it was too late, because I stupidly trusted that my ancient Professional Management teacher had given us accurate and up to date information.
Finally, the one thing They *were *right about: home health nursing is not appropriate for new grads. I’m ever so grateful I have a job, and it was the only one I could get at the time, but I shouldn’t have gotten it. I’ve had a hell of a time learning how to be a nurse when I don’t work shoulder to shoulder with other nurses. It’s very much slowed my professional development and it’s being a terrifying year.
In Louisiana, completing your first year of nursing school qualifies you to be a CNA or Nurse Tech.
She could start off as a CNA in a nursing home. That will give her experience in working with multiple patients, seeing the variety of personalities and body forms, caring for bed-ridden patients, nourishment difficulties, and handling eliminations.
She could also nurse tech in any area of the hospital, every area needs someone to do the grunt work. I’m talking bed care, meals, potty. She would also assist the RN in wound care and other procedures. At this level she may see medications, but never handle them.
CNAs and techs can change jobs after 6 months, so there’s a good chance to move into a better position.
The university in town send students to my hospital for clinicals. For those who also work as ER Nurse Techs, about 80% are hired as ER RNs when they graduate. No, you probably won’t be hired for the ER if you only worked at a nursing home and did some clinicals. Your chances will be better after a few years med/surg or telemetry.
I’m not a nurse or doctor, but I imagine that hospital nursing is very much a minute-by-minute thing where you are constantly rushing here and there to handle emergencies and this patient needs a blood transfusion five minutes ago because he’s leaking like a sieve, that other patient needs to be unloaded from the ambulance and taken to the ICU before his heart stops, and these charts over here have to get to Room 305 in the next 10 minutes because Dr. Jones has only 45 minutes to determine whether or not to put the patient into life-saving surgery right here tonight or ship them to the newer hospital across town which has better equipment but will cost precious time. These are things that have catastrophic deadlines.
I imagine that nursing home nursing is a bit more laid back, slower, with a lot of time to engage in Active Listening with patients and find ways to increase their comfort, empathize, and spend time concentrating on gradually improving routines and processes, with the occasional medical emergency where the patient is probably going to the hospital for acute care anyway so you basically need to get them into the ambulance. The consequences for not thinking quickly on your toes is quite a bit less damaging and you can take your time in making decisions.
Yeah, but nursing assistants are nurses, and aren’t doing the hectic emergecy decision making. They’re wiping butts and assisting with feeding patients that have trouble eating and the like.
I just figured that being a nursing assistant anywhere would be a jumpstart on med terminology and give contacts in the industry, but the perception being bandied around is that working in a nursing home as a nursing assistant will actively degrade your resume when you finally do get a degree as a nurse. That’s the part that doesn’t make any sense to me.
I can understand once actually getting a nursing degree that if you elected to work for a while in a nursing home situation you might not have the right training for a hospital situation, but if you’re a fresh nurse from college who happens to have some experience in a medical environment, shouldn’t that trump a fresh grad with no exposure?