Work, Classes, and CNA

One thing that we found out after Sarah began her freshman year at UW-LaCrosse was that in order to get accepted into the PA Program, she needed to have 1000 patient contact hours logged. They gave her examples of service that would count toward those hours, and the most popular, or easiest to get, was doing work that required having a CNA degree. Unfortunately, Sarah does not have her CAN. Had she known, she could have taken the required classes for it in high school. There are programs that you can take at tech school, but it requires 80 hours of class time and 40 hours of patient contact time. That time is spread out over an entire semester.

She could potentially take the required classes over the summer, but because of the time commitment, that would cut into her ability to work full time this summer. And since she is going to be living off campus, she will need to work as much as possible in order to pay her rent and bills. She doesn’t absolutely NEED to get her CAN, but then that leads to the dilemma of how to get those hours without having to cut into work or class time before she is able to apply to PA school. Even if she could get her CAN, she’d still need to figure out where and how to work in the healthcare field where she would be able to get those hours in. We do have a couple of years to help her figure it out and nothing says she HAS to go to UWL to get her PA degree. Sarah could always transfer. But every school we have looked at since finding out the patient contact requirement has some sort of requirement of hours, just not as many as UWL. Until she has to apply, we’ll keep looking for ways to help Sarah get those hours.