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Name: Allisa Horkley

Hometown: Gig Harbor

Major: Biology

Which engagement track did you follow? I did the the Leadership engagement track.

CNA Course

For my project I enrolled and completed a CNA course. We met once a week on Saturday for 12 weeks. Each class was eight hours long, so much of my project was spent sitting in a classroom learning about the responsibilities that CNA’s have. We were given a workbook at the beginning of the class that had problems for each chapter of the textbook that we were required to finish to pass the class. Along with the workbook we also had to turn in at the end of the class 50 vocab words from the textbook that we didn’t know until we learned about them in class.

To pass the class we were also required to complete two 12 hour shifts at The Meadows, which is a long-term facility in St. George, UT. During those two 12 hour shifts we gained hand on experience on how to carry out the skills that we learned and talked about in class. Also we were given a piece a paper of the things we had to do during the two shifts. One was talking to residents and learning a little about them. At the end of the class we were required to turn in another piece of paper that had the vital signs (blood pressure, pulse and respiration) for 48 people. We were to take these vital signs throughout the course of the class to help boost our confidence in taking vitals signs of different people.

When I finally decided I wanted to apply the Physician Assistant (PA) program one of the things that was required was patient exposure hours. There were a lot of different jobs that I could have done to get the hours that I needed, but I was having a hard time deciding. My sister was the one who asked me if I had considered becoming a CNA. She had gone through the course and worked as a CNA until she left for college when I was still in high school. She said that she thought I would be really good and that I should give it a try. I signed up for a CNA class a month later.

One of the biggest problems I ran into was staying awake during the class. I had a full course load from SUU and then I was waking up early on Saturday to make it to the class that started at 8am. Then I would have to sit for eight hours and try to stay awake. Another problem I ran into was falling behind in the workbook. As I’ve already said I was taking a full course load from SUU and so there was a couple of weeks that I was unable to complete the questions in the workbook for the chapter.

When I did the two 12 hour shifts and The Meadows my project was able to benefit the other CNAs that actually worked at The Meadows. Being a CNA is really underappreciated, which is why not a lot of people become one resulting in many of the long-term facilities being understaffed. My project helped me learn how to properly help and care for the residents. The fact that I knew what to do and the general idea of how to take care of the residents let the CNAs working at The Meadows have less work. By being there helping the CNAs we were able to stay on schedule and get all the residents taken care of.

This project has really helped me in being more confident in taking care of other people. At first the idea of being responsible for the health of another person was kind of scary because you don’t want to do anything wrong. Many of the residents that I meant were really nice and patient with me while I learned how to do a CNAs job. One thing we learned in class was how to have empathy for the residents because many are going through hard times medically. I have learned how to put myself in other people's shoes and how to comfort them. Two quotes from my personal journal that I wrote in during the duration of my project:

“Today I met with one of the residents to ask him a couple questions about himself. When we walked into the room and began talking to him it seemed like he slowly got happier as we talked. He was really nice and I found out that we had a lot in common.”

“Class was super boring. I had a really hard time staying awake and I think my instructor noticed cause he kept making a ton of jokes. Some of the jokes were actually pretty funny.”