With employment in health care expected to grow faster on average than positions in other sectors, Santiago Canyon College continues to add certificate programs to help meet that demand.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, this trend will continue through 2032.
A little more than five years after launching its certified nurse assistant program, SCC is now offering an assistant acute care program designed to train nurse assistants for employment in an acute care facility.
In the CNA certificate program, students earn a nurse assistant certificate and have the knowledge to work in a health care environment, said Chrissy Gascon, dean of Instruction and Student Services, Continuing Education at Santiago Canyon College.
The curriculum is based on the professional standards established by regulatory agencies, she added.
“A student can take the whole program in one semester and then begin working right away in a health care environment, under the supervision of a nurse, and make a decent wage,” Gascon said.
Students enrolling in the nurse assistant acute care program must already have a CNA certificate.
Acute care program students are currently doing their clinical training at Providence St. Joseph in Orange, where they rotate through 10 different units under the supervision of a nurse.
Those include pulmonary renal, clinical decision, mother and baby, orthopedics, general surgery, medical telemetry, oncology, labor delivery and emergency unit.
By being exposed to every specialty, students might be drawn to one particular specialty and pursue a position in that specialty, she said.
“St. Joseph has been very welcoming and supportive of our students, giving them access to train at the different floors,” said Cristina Morones, assistant professor of career education. “The goal of this is to upskill our students so that they can then transition from working in skilled nursing facilities into hospitals and then, hopefully, a pay increase, because we always want our students to move up and make a good living wage to improve their living conditions and help support their educational and personal goals.”
Training in a hospital setting also puts the students in a space where they can network and make connections in a hospital, Morones said.
“So really the goal is to give students access, to upscale them and to, hopefully, job placement at hospitals and also wage increases,” she said.
SCC started offering health care career pathway programs about 15 years ago, Gascon said.
SCC will continue to focus on health care pathways, Gascon said, especially since the college is in a city where there are four large hospitals and a county that is up and coming in the health care arena.
“There are a lot of very good jobs for our students,” Gascon said. “When we go out and ask our community what they need, this is what they want.”
SCC was recently awarded a California Apprenticeship Initiative grant to create apprenticeships for its health care program. The initiative is intended to provide community college apprenticeship program students with a direct path to credit certificates and degrees.
SCC is currently developing a licensed vocational nursing program, Gascon said.
The college is simply responding to the needs of the local hospitals, she said.
Other medical occupation certificates offered at SCC include behavior technician, care giver/personal aid, lactation educator specialist and medical billing.
Gascon said a possible health care pathway could look like this:
Caregiver to CNA, to CNA acute care, to LVN and then eventually earn an RN.
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