Mea Culpa

While trying to make a point, I didn't delineate fine enough.

In the world of medicine there's hyper fine gradations of "nurse".

Each with it's own skills, license and education requirements.

Then there's the job that a person is required to do and the level of nurse mandated to do it.

When I mentioned that my CNA relatives and RN friend agreed that the skill set to do the work is similar it was in reference to the job that the, now arrested, unlicensed former CNA was performing.

The home-health care job can be performed by just about any half intelligent, conscientious, and reasonably careful schlub.  The actual skill requirements to perform the job are very low.

The skill, education and license requirements are very high. 

But people doing the job have to be rated to do some serious shit that never comes up in the course of the job.

A CNA isn't trained to do RN stuff when the world is pear shaped.  I am sorry if I implied they had those skills when talking about barriers to entry.

But I think we can agree that you don't need to be certified to the level that RN's are to hand out little paper cups with pills in them.  Yet, in Florida, an RN has to pass the pills out to the lower rated folks to deliver to patients.

I we can also agree that it doesn't take as many RN's as are mandated to the work.  Especially since they justified having this level of education and skills as a "just in case" of pear shaped crisis. 

This also ignores that a practicing emergency room RN is living in a vastly different environment than an ACLF charge nurse or a home health care service nurse. 

The actual job that two RN's of my acquaintance do at an ACLF and a hospice, respectively, is sit behind a desk and surf the internet all night.  When something happens it's, essentially in two categories:  Sign off on what their minions did to fix the problem or call the doctor.  One of them BRAGS about how little they do.

The job these two are doing we called CQ, or charge of quarters, in the Army.  I don't think it needs an RN to do it.  Just like most home health.

Again, the person arrested with a CNA level of education was doing the RN job long enough to earn a promotion it was a routine background check that noticed the lack of certification for the job they were performing, not a failure to perform the tasks.