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in July 2001.
Located just off I-5 in the Fifth
Street Professional Building in Maryville,
MEDPREP offers monthly courses to provide
a friendly and thorough training program for
people interested in working as nursing assis-
tants.
Stickles is the owner as well as the sole
instructor at MEDPREP, where she offers
day and evening courses each month.
"I want to make sure that people are
trained in common sense,” she said.
Each course offers four weeks of instruc-
tion that combines three to four days of
classroom study per week with additional
days devoted to hands-on training in the
school’s clinical lab. Since MEDPREP opened,
enrollment has expanded from five students
to nearly 30, and courses are available each
month of the year. “I don’t take a month
off,” Stickles said.
The students who attend MEDPREP make
up a diverse group, including military wives,
members of the Tulalip Tribes, welfare-to-
work participants, and students for whom
English is a second language. On the day
Stickles was interviewed for this article, she
said that “of the 19 people in class today,
probably 12 were ESL (English is a second
language) students.”
Stickles described MEDPREP as a relaxed,
comfortable atmosphere, “nothing fancy,”
but added that “we tear this room apart so
that it’s functional for the students.”
After learning about caregiving skills dur-
ing class lectures, students practice their skills
under Stickles’ supervision during lab time.
On a given day, students might be working
together to practice making and unmaking
occupied beds, or taking off their shoes and
socks to give each other therapeutic foot
soaks.
With each lab activity, Stickles reminds
students to communicate with patients and
be respectful of their individuality. “I really
push the patients’ needs,” she said.
“Students
need the perspective of what it’s
like to be the patient.”
Upon completion of their
classroom and
school lab work, students must also perform
36 hours of on-site work at local long term
care facilities. MEDPREP currently contracts
with three long term care facilities located in
Snohomish, Stanwood and Anacortes. While
students are required to complete 36 hours,
they have the option of completing more.
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“They can do as
many hours as it takes for
them to feel comfortable. Some students
have done one hundred hours,” Stickles said.
Because the students complete so much
supervised clinical lab time, Stickles said,
when students are in the workplace, “they
can never say ‘I haven’t seen it’ or ‘I haven’t
done it.’”
Upon successful completion of a MEDPREP
training course, students can register
with the state of Washington as a nursing
assistant. In order to be certified as a nursing
assistant in Washington, students need to
pass an additional test (administered locally
in Shoreline) to demonstrate their knowledge
of caregiving skills. “There are 23 skills stu-
dents need to know for the state test. We
teach three times that,” Stickles said.
While some nursing homes provide their
own training programs, Stickles said that this
practice has become relatively uncommon.
“Nursing homes have 120 days to get a new
hire certified, and with a huge turnover,
many nursing homes are no longer hiring
people without certification.”
The good news is that students who suc-
cessfully complete their training and are certi-
fied by the state can often get reimbursed for
their tuition expenses when they are hired by
a long term care facility. MEDPREP can also
accept vouchers from DSHS, Employment
Security and other worker retraining pro-
grams.
Stickles is always looking to contract with
other long term care facilities to give students
more options for sites to complete their train-
ing hours, and she welcomes the opportunity
to expand her training program to include
continuing education classes.
“Nursing assistants need to complete 12
hours of continuing education per year, and
I’d like to get a phone call from a facility ask-
ing me to teach those hours,” she said.
Stickles
has avoided raising tuition rates,
and the cost for a training course at MEDPREP
remains under $500. Students can register in
person as well as online. For more information,
call (425) 257-9888 or see
www.medprep.com.
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By Amanda
Laughtland
Special to JobSource
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