Certified Nursing Assistant

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Why do certified nursing assistants need to know how to use and read a medical chart? Reading and Writing is fundamental in every career from teaching, legal occupations, engineering, and most importantly in the medical field. According to the nursing assistant guide, written and oral communication are necessary skills in the nursing occupation. The use of writing and reading skills is applied to a number of job responsibilities of certified nursing assistants including documenting medical records, making notes, reading prescription requirements and updating the patient medical chart systematically. Also according to the nursing assistant guide, “as a CNA you’ll be the liaison between patients and nurses, and being able to understand each…show more content…
“A nurse supervisor manages all of the registered nurses on their team” (Education Portal, 2014). Their main goal is to make sure things run smoothly within their team and that patient’s are being treated with the best care. Since supervisors deal with a mass of issues and approach many difficult situations, they have to know how to read and write a vast amount of medical terminology and their abbreviations. In many cases, nurses communicate with nursing assistants by using medical terminology or abbreviations of them. Writing these abbreviations and understanding them is extremely important in the medical field. Therefore, no abbreviation should be mistaken for another. As a certified nursing assistant, it is important to read and understand all possible medical terminology that may be used in their field of work. According to Weinstein and Schmidt, “one of the mental burdens of the new intern is learning an entirely new “abbreviated vocabulary”, which might be more appropriately called hospital jargon”. These jargons can be easily mistaken, but as a nursing assistant, it is their responsibility to know the jargons that are used by nurses or supervisors. For example, the jargon “b.i.d.” is the abbreviation for twice a day, possibly referring to meals or medications. Another example is “B.P.” which is short for bathroom privileges. Therefore, if a nurse leaves a note to the nursing assistant that the patient is only allowed “B.P” around her medicine dosage because the medicine causes dizziness, and the nursing assistant interprets the note wrong, harm can be brought to the patient. By interpreting a note wrongfully and possibly allowing the patient bathroom privileges when he or she should not, the patient may experience an episode of dizziness and possibly fall and hurt
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