Medical Training

So you finished going to an LVN school in California and you are wondering, “That was a lot of work, but what can I do with this LVN certification?” Well, first of all, think back to when you made the decision to become a nurse in the first place. Did you want to help people? If so, in what way?  Maybe you took care of a family member who was sick at home and you thought that was something you could do as a career.  Maybe it’s a career change because you wanted to be an advocate for people who are disabled or in capacitated due to illness.  Once you remember the initial reason for your becoming an LVN, you can explore possibilities and options available.  If you like children, look into hospitals, clinics, home health care, pediatric hospice, or maybe school nursing.  You liked the technology and machines, look into the companies who made them and give them a call.  They use nurses to help teach others how to use them and to sell them.  This could be a lot of fun.  If you happen to like the excitement and the adrenaline rush of thinking on your feet and acting quickly and yet not get too emotionally involved with the patient, then maybe emergency room nursing is for you.  It’s a very fast paced area to work.  If you do like working with people, the patients and other health care providers, then bedside nursing is great.  You have 8 or 10 or 12 hour shifts where you will see the patient throughout those hours.  And within that area are several specialties, such as geriatrics, that is working with the elderly.  You could work at skilled nursing facilities, rehabilitation centers, day care facilities, or some retirement homes have need of nurses. Sometimes you have to think outside of the box when considering where to work. Large manufacturing companies often have on-site nurses, sporting facilities where professional athletes play, camp nursing would allow one to be outside and work with either healthy or special populations (asthmatics, cancer patients, etc), and working in the prison system.  Prisoners get sick or already were, so there is another special area of care.

Do you enjoy seeing other parts of the country or even the world?  Travel nursing is an exciting field.  Many nursing magazines have advertisements for travel nurses.  You get to experience living in another part of the country, learning about their culture and beliefs, maybe even a different language.

Registry nursing is a challenging area to be.  Here you would work within a company who would send you out to appropriate places to work.  It could be one-to-one nursing in someone’s home, or possibly working in a hospital, or even giving out flu shots at the local drug store, constantly changing environments with new people.

LVN’s also can become instructors and teach other students to become LVNs.  But, with all these areas of nursing, you have to do research and find out more about it.  Some areas will only accept registered nurses; that is why you have to ask more questions. Sometimes you have to explore further from the cities to find where an LVN can work, but the jobs are out there.

Well, the Summer break is officially over at Gurnick Academy of Medical Arts, and it’s time to roll up those sleeves again and get back to work. For some of our LVN students it’s time to continue their studies, get back to those thick textbooks and get ready to take more lecture notes. They feel like the seniors of Gurnick Academy. LVN classrooms come back to life after a two-week break, and like a busy bee-hive, our LVN college is buzzing again with students hurrying to their classes, instructors walking down the hallways, locomotion in the corridors, moving desks, equipment, projectors… lights… camera… action!

And yet, though some of our nursing students are soon to graduate, others are only beginning their journey. We are talking about the LVN students who are just starting their LVN program now. This will be their first module, and they are about to take their first LVN course, the Fundamentals of Nursing. Our newcomers are about to experience their first contact with this profession, with the world of nursing, as they attend the Clinical Skills Lab course. And even though they have a long way to go to their graduation day and they may feel a little nervous right now, they are excited, because they know that they are on their way to something wonderful, stimulating, and very rewarding. Welcome back to school, Gurnick!

The end of the Spring Module has come! The grades are in, and the summer break is starting! Here, at Gurnick Academy, we especially want our LVN students to succeed in their endeavor of obtaining quality education and experience on the way to successful careers. We, the Gurnick family, are very proud of our LVN program, because we wish success to all that enter it. If you have come to us, we meet you with open arms, and make sure, you get all the help on your way to a new beginning in your life, because we give education to all those who want an education in LVN nursing!

So, as usual, at the end of the module, we look back and sum up the successes of our nursing students. No one is left behind here. Even those, who need assistance in academic progress or have fallen behind on their studying or clinical hours, will be given chances to improve their grades to catch up with the rest of their classmates. It is like a family here: we care about all our students, and we sincerely want them to be successful in studies and in practice. This is why we have remediation procedures for the ones who had hard time in the past module, and need to catch up. No one is left behind, and we, Gurnick Academy of Medical Arts, are proud of this!

There is excitement in the air because Gurnick’s LVN students in Group 11 and 12 have their last clinical day tomorrow, Friday, June 18, 2010.  The Gurnick LVN students have been working for LVN certification and studying hard the last couple of months and they await a well needed break. The students will enjoy two weeks off before their last module starts. Many Gurnick students have discussed that even though they will not be going to class, they will start to look into the availability of LVN jobs in California.  The students are realizing that with only one more module to complete before graduation, their career in nursing is becoming a reality.

As a clinical instructor, I have seen the students grow and develop their nursing skills, critical thinking and self confidence. They are well on their way to becoming wonderful nurses. This last module they have focused on bedside care, vital signs, documentation, administrating medication, wound dressing changes and insertion of Foley catheters. Many of the students had the opportunity to remove stables and apply steri-strips to an incisions site.

For their last module, the Gurnick students in Groups 11 and 12 will be able to focus on OB/GYN, Pediatrics and Psychology.

Here we are, Gurnick Academy of Medical Arts has joined the latest trend of blogging, and so fashionably is publishing the latest happenings on the Gurnick horizon. So, what IS happening this week, you will ask, and the answer as always is: working toward the success of our LVN students. They, harder than ever, are working toward their degrees. Final exams are coming soon, and Medsurg with Pharmacology, being a super tough combination, is grounding our LVN students harder than ever.

They can’t wait for the summer break to come. And it is coming in just a couple of weeks, but until then, it is the hard study time. Surely, they can’t wait to throw their textbooks and uniforms somewhere in the far corner of their closet, but for now the scrubs and the books must work overtime. Cumulative exams on the material, learned over the past three months, are not an easy task. LVN program is difficult and challenging here at Gurnick, but it pays off. Where else will you find such a fantastic combination of teachers, staff, and a program that guarantees you success in just one year, if you put your mind to it? Where else will you find instructors and administration working selflessly to help every student succeed in their endeavor of completing the LVN program?

Gurnick Academy is the only LVN college in the Bay Area who can proudly say: “we care about our LVN students, and we help them any way we can.” Whether it is health issues, problems in the family, work situation, or financial difficulties, we work it out with our students. After all, our mission is to help everyone who wants to do something with their life and get an education, get their education here at Gurnick.

The delicious smell of barbeque smoke is in the air, every here and there, chairs are pulled outside, backyard umbrellas open, and swimming pools become crowded by the minute. Cars, with happy dogs peaking out of the windows, are rushing to the shore, to the ocean, where the hot summer sun meets the welcoming, soft sand and the cool, salty water. The summer is here.

As our LVN schools doors swing open, out hurry our nursing students, hugging their books, holding them against their bodies, rushing to their cars, or catching those rides home. They hurry home to their families to start the summer vacation. No school for two whole weeks! No homework, no classes, no clinicals, no tests, no quizzes, no sweat! Well, perhaps, yes, sweat, but that would be from the hot Californian sun, kissing the pale in-door student skin and the tired bodies, exhausted from hard work and sleepless nights, while studying at our high-paced LVN program.

For two whole weeks there will be not a care in the world. Going to an LVN College is great and rewarding, but nothing beats a good, healthy, so-very-relaxing school break! The summer is here, and even though, the Gurnick LVN students are very serious about their studies, they will also seriously enjoy their well-deserved summer break.

As we head into the last weeks of the current module, our students are looking forward to a well-earned 2-week summer break.  Students in groups 11 and 12, who are currently in Module 3, have been studying Medical Surgical Nursing and Pharmacology for 22 weeks straight (as there is no break between Module 2 and Module 3), and they are feeling it.  They are also feeling more accomplished and comfortable in their student-nurse role, and all that it entails.  Students in Groups 13 and 14 are finishing up Module 1, and looking forward to beginning the clinical internships at various skilled nursing centers in the Concord area.  They have also made strides in becoming capable student nurses as they continue their education and training at Gurnick Academy.

We are looking forward to our new batch of LVN and PT students scheduled to begin their prerequisite class on July 6th.  The VN/PT prerequisite class, Essential Medical Bioscience, includes an introduction to anatomy and physiology, as well as introductory study of medical terminology and drug calculations.  For those that haven’t practiced math since high school, manipulating fractions, decimals and metric conversions can be challenging.  But through steady practice, most all students are successful in mastering the drug calculation skills necessary for becoming an LVN.

Our students come from a variety of backgrounds when they enter the LVN program.  Some are Certified Nursing Assistants furthering their career in health care.  For these students the practice of patient transfer and general approach to patient care is familiar.  For these students, however, the training and education to become an LVN usually involves “unlearning” their role as a CNA.  The approach to the patient or client as an LVN requires a deeper level of critical thinking and analysis of client data.  Beginning with obtaining vital signs, the CNA turned LVN student recognizes not just abnormalities, but takes the VN student into the realm of, “why is this happening?”  More education in anatomy, physiology and critical thinking enables the CNA turned LVN student to begin to think like a nurse.

Have you heard about the Bodies Revealed exhibit?  This exhibit’s title is aptly named as it reveals not only how the body works beneath the skin, but also stimulates the viewer to see themselves in ways they may never have imagined.  This summer, our LVN program students and their instructors will have the opportunity to learn about various systems of the human body and their interrelated functions as they view two hundred organs and fourteen plasticized human bodies.

Instead of learning about anatomy in a cadaver lab reeking of noxious formaldehyde or limited to the four walls of a LVN classroom, the students will enhance their LVN education with a three-dimensional walking tour to see the effects of disease and unhealthy lifestyles on the body. By witnessing the effects of disease the students will naturally turn inward taking an introspective look at their own life style and choices, and, hopefully, be inspired and motivated to care for their own bodies.  Moreover, if you’re feeling a little uneasy reading about the students examining real dead bodies, imagine the advantage to the student nurse.

Instead the overwhelming feelings that might be stimulated upon experiencing the death of a patient for the first time, the students can begin to address their own feelings about death and dying as they walk through the cell-phone-off corridors of the museum. This will be an experience they will probably never forget.