Welcome back!
Most of the HCA program courses centre around communication. The different styles of communication, how to recognize/differentiate between the good and the bad ways of communicating, when there is a need for verbal communication versus nonverbal… Though knowing how to communicate both verbally and through nonverbal cues is a great asset to have in life, the HCA program possibly could have survived without such a long course on communication. However we did however have an amazing teacher, probably one of the top three teachers I’ve ever had throughout my school years, who added more time for the courses that needed it.
Anatomy and Physiology course
Hands down my favourite course during the HCA program was Anatomy and Physiology, or A&P. I always knew that the human body was pretty amazing, but studying it in depth like we did really gave me a new appreciation for it and how everything works. I mean our brains run on electrical pulses! That’s pretty amazing.
Saying that though, A&P was by far the hardest course we studied. I believe it’s because we had such a short time period to learn it and there was A LOT to learn. We were reading three (sometimes four) chapters a night, and it isn’t light reading. As well, we’d be studying for an exam a week, on top of trying to remember what we learned last week! But we all made it through and it was probably the best day when we were handed our final A&P exam results and could breathe a sigh of relief knowing we passed. I hope I’m not scaring you away from taking the HCA program; it’s really an amazing program!
Learning about mental health
Towards the end of the program we learned all about mental health. I know it’s next to impossible to be able to study every single mental health disease but we learned about the basic clusters, how to recognize their signs and symptoms and of course treatment of the disease and tricks to manage them. Learning about the many facets of mental health really grabbed my attention. It’s a sad and yet amazing thing, mental health diseases and disorders.
We had to do an hour presentation on a disorder or disease and my group chose Schizophrenia. Watching movies and hearing about schizophrenia I assumed (wrongly I may add) that it would be a piece of cake project…boy was I wrong. In total our group spent close to 15 hours of time on the project, most of that being our own personal time. However all our hard work paid off when we got 100%.
Our teacher was a care aid for years before she climbed the ladder up to Licensed Practical Nurse so when she was marking our exams or projects she was hard on us. She knew that if she pushed us, in turn we would push ourselves and for most of the students in my class her method proved right and we all benefited from her dedication to teaching us as much as she possible could. She is an AMAZING teacher and I know that I wouldn’t have done as well as I did in my program if it wasn’t for her.
Until next time,
