Certified Nursing Assistant or Home Health Aide
Job Description
Education:
All aides are to be certified through a vocational school. If training is received from a hospital or licensed home health agency, the curriculum must be documented.
Job Duties
Provide and maintain bodily and emotional comfort and assist the patient, toward independent living in a safe environment.
When in the patient’s home, you are responsible for cooking nutritional balanced meals.
Assisting the patient with personal hygiene, ambulation, eating, dressing, shaving and vital signs when needed.
You must perform other activities if they have been taught by a health professional. These include:
- Assisting with change of colostomy bag, prescribed range of motion exercises and prescribed ice cap or collar.
- Shampoo and bathing.
- Walker or Wheelchair.
- Doing simple urine tests for sugar, acetone or albumin measuring.
- Preparing special Diets.
- Intake or Output.
The H.H.A./C.N.A. does not do the following:
- Change sterile dressings
- Irrigate body cavities such as enema or a colostomy or wound.
- Perform a gastric lavage.
- Catheterize a patient.
- Administer medications.
- Apply heat by any method.
- Care for a tracheotomy tube.
- Any personal health services which have not been included by the R.N. in the patient care plan.
- The home health aide keeps records of personal health care activities.
- The H.H.A./C.N.A. observes appearance of gross behavioral changes in the patient and reports to the Registered Nurse.
The H.H.A./C.N.A. will be responsible for the following:
- For keeping the patients environment clean and safe.
- Includes washing the dishes after cooking.
- Making the patients bed and changing the linens.
- Any light housekeeping that needs to be done.
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The H.H.A./C.N.A. performs only those personal care activities contained in a written assignment by a health care professional.
- The H.H.A./C.N.A. patient’s service is evaluated by a health professional in the patient’s home as frequent as necessary to assure safe, adequate care of at least every (2) to (3) months.
- Provide companionship to the patient and assist with care of children.
- Provide escort services such as taking the patient to the doctor.
- Assist the patient with marketing as required.
- When working in the home you are responsible for providing your own meals. This includes all snacks and beverages. The patient’s food should not be eaten by the employee.
- The H.H.A./C.N.A. may also provide the following assistance with self administered medication after they have received a minimum of 2 hours of training (which can be part of the 40 hour home health training). This must be done prior to assuming this responsibility.
Prepare necessary items such as juice, water, cups or spoons to assist the patient in the self administration of medications:
- Open and close the medication container or tear the foil of prepackaged medications.
- Assist the resident in the self administration process. Examples of such assistance include the steadying of the arm, hand, or other parts of the patients body so as to allow the self administration of medications.
- Assist the patient by placing unused doses of solid medication back into the medication container.
Assist with self administration of self medication includes:
- Taking the medication, in its previously dispensed, properly labeled container from where it’s stored and bringing it to the patient.
- In the presence of the patient, reading the label, opening the container, removing a prescribed amount of medication from the container to his or her mouth.
- Placing an oral dosage in the patients hand or placing the dosage of another container and helping the patient by lifting the container to his/her mouth.
- Applying topical medications.
- Returning the medication container to proper storage.
- Keeping a record of when a patient receives assistance with self-administration under this section.
Assistance of self-administration does not include:
- Mixing, compounding, converting, or calculating medication doses, except for measuring a prescribed amount of liquid medication or breaking a scored tablet or crushing a tablet as prescribed.
- The presentation of syringes for injection or administration of medications by any injectable route.
- Administration of medications through intermittent positive pressure breathing machines or nebulizer.
- Administration of medications by way of tube inserted in a cavity of the body.
- Administration of parental preparations.
- Irrigations or deriding agents used in the treatment of a skin condition.
- Rectal, urethral or vaginal preparations.
- Medications ordered by a physician or health care professional with prescriptive authority to be given ‘as needed’ unless the order is written with specific parameters that preclude independent judgment on the part of the unlicensed persons, and at the request of a competent patient.
The H.H.A./C.N.A. may provide:
- Obtaining the medication container from the storage area for the patient.
- Ensuring that the medication is prescribed for the patient.
- Reminding the patient that it is time to take the medication as prescribed.
- Observing the patient self-administering the medication.