A shortage of certified nursing assistants is causing area care facilities to get creative with staffing and looking for ways to inject interest back into this important field.

“Our CNAs are the backbone of our home and without them we could not function,” Oak Hill administrator Kim Keckritz said.

Over the past few months, Oak Hill and its sister facilities in Waterloo have been down as many as 13 nurses. And it’s a problem being repeated across the metro-east.

“We’re not really getting any applications (for CNAs),” Keckritz said.

This prompted her to look deeper into the problem. She discovered that the Career Center of Southern Illinois hadn’t held a CNA class in a year for a variety of reasons.

“That really affected us, because when they have a class, they do their clinicals here,” she said.
So the two organizations put their heads together, so to speak, and are making a renewed effort to spread information about the CNA field and opportunities for education and employment locally.

“If somebody’s interested in becoming a CNA, they can come here and work some part-time hours as a support person for the nursing staff, so they can get a feel for health care in general,” Keckritz said. “We will help them, along with a scholarship program that is available that pays for their CNA class.”

The CNA program at CCSI is six weeks long. Students enrolled in it can work part time at Oak Hill to earn a little income, and when they finish they have employment lined up.

“And if they decide they want to take the next step, which would be (becoming a) license practical nurse, we have a weekend option program where they can work the weekend and one evening a week and they’ll get paid full time, have full-time benefits, and that frees up all their weekdays so they can go to school,” Keckritz said.

CNAs are on the front lines of daily care in facilities like Oak Hill. They are responsible for assisting residents when they eat, dress and bathe. They check vital signs and help residents be mobile. By having plenty of interaction with residents and developing strong relationships with them, CNAs are able to monitor physical, mental and emotional concerns of residents and report changes.

“The CNA truly makes a difference in the residents’ lives,” Keckritz said.

The time is right to begin a career in the medical field. As baby boomers age and life expectancies increase, the need for people to work in all aspects of health care is expected to outgrow most other fields over the next 10 to 20 years.

“It takes the right person to do this job, but I think there are a lot of people out there that want to be in nursing but just don’t know how to get there,” she said.