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I work in the medical-legal niche within the USA. I have a master’s in preventative medicine (aka public health). There was a brief period where I tried to become a CNA (certified nursing assistant) and completed about 70% of my training for the said job before I was forced to stop due to a medical crisis. For my undergraduate degree, I majored in studio art and minored in biology. With that said, I feel like I have a pretty good formal educational background for the type of work I do. I have worked in some shape or form with healthcare for a little over two years at this point as well.
For people wanting to do any kind of medical-legal work in the USA, I strongly feel that they need to incorporate nursing training into their formal educational background. Especially if they want to do cases involving the geriatric community. Why? A lot of medical-legal work involves nursing. I am not asking for every person to get a full-blown LPN (licensed practical nurse) or RN (registered nurse) education under their belt, but going through at least what CNA must learn to do their job is vital to gain a better understanding of what nurses must do (as a bare minimum) on a day to day basis for their job.
CNAs do a lot of the “grunt work” relating to the geriatric healthcare, but their job duties are absolutely vital for the patient’s overall health and wellbeing. Lawyers need to understand what goes into their job to understand how to question healthcare workers. They need to understand the common medication and treatment protocol that goes into helping these patients. The best way is to incorporate a CNA’s training academic curricula into their formal training.
