How to Become a Home Health Aide

Becoming a home health aide is a wonderful way to get out of a rut, and into a great profession where you can interface with caring, responsible people and be treated as a professional. It's one of the last occupations where you don't need a an expensive degree, and you don't need to put in a lot of time to get your credentials.

Instructions

1. Find out the certification procedures for your state. Most states require a high school diploma or a GED. Some states, however, do not. Most states require at least 75 hours of supervised training, and a proficiency test at the end of the training to receive an HHA (Home Health Aide) certification.

2. Understand that home health aides help elderly, convalescent or disabled persons live in their own homes instead of in a health care facility. Under the direction of nursing or medical staff, they provide health-related services, such as administering oral medications.

3. Ask yourself if you can handle it. Like nursing aides, home health aides may check patients' pulse rate, temperature and respiration rate; help with simple prescribed exercises; keep patients' rooms neat and help patients to move from bed, bathe, dress and groom. Occasionally, they change non sterile dressings, give massages and alcohol rubs or assist with braces and artificial limbs. Experienced home health aides also may assist with medical equipment such as ventilators, which help patients breathe.

4. Contact home health agencies for the requirements to be a HHA. Usually, a registered nurse, physical therapist,or social worker usually assigns specific duties to and supervises home health aides, who keep records of the services they perform and record each patient's condition and progress. The aides report changes in a patient's condition to the supervisor or case manager.

Tips & Warnings

• Remember, most home health aides work with elderly or disabled persons who need more extensive care than family or friends can provide. Some help discharged hospital patients who have relatively short-term needs.

• If changing dressings or helping someone with body functions is something that you could not see yourself doing, this is not a job for you. There are many things a home health aide must do for a person that they cannot do for themselves.

Resources

• Visit Home Health Aide Finders, an employment site.