Patient Care Assistant (PCA) - Multiple Openings

About the role

The Patient Care Assistant (PCA) position at Houston Methodist is responsible for providing basic patient care activities of daily living (ADLs) under the supervision of a licensed nurse. This includes assisting with patient elimination, hygiene, comfort, safety, nutrition, and progress activity. The PCA also conducts hourly rounding to ensure patient needs are met and reports observations and patient problems to the licensed nurse.

Qualifications

• Education: High School diploma or equivalent education (examples include: GED, verification of homeschool equivalency, partial or full completion of post-secondary education, etc.)
• Experience: Must complete one of the following:
  • PCA externship
  • PCA internal internship
  • Six months of direct patient care experience
  • Enrolled in a school of nursing program with a completed first clinical rotation

Skills and Abilities

• Demonstrates the skills and competencies necessary to safely perform the assigned job, determined through on-going skills, competency assessments, and performance evaluations
• Sufficient proficiency in speaking, reading, and writing the English language necessary to perform the essential functions of this job, especially with regard to activities impacting patient or employee safety or security
• Ability to effectively communicate with patients, physicians, family members and co-workers in a manner consistent with a customer service focus and application of positive language principles

Essential Functions

• People Essential Functions: Promotes a positive work environment with the interprofessional care team. Interacts with peers, staff, and physicians in a supportive and respectful manner. Provides contributions towards improvement of department scores for employee engagement.
• Service Essential Functions: Follows the patient and family-centered care standards and provides direct patient care under the direction of a registered nurse. Assists with maintaining, cleaning, and stocking of equipment and supplies as established on assigned unit. Contributes towards improving department scores for patient satisfaction through peer-to-peer accountability.
• Quality/Safety Essential Functions: Reports observations, conditions and problems of patients to licensed personnel to achieve desired patient outcomes. Provides for the privacy of patients and families, keeping the safety of the patient in mind. Conducts hourly rounding to ensure patient needs are met (four P’s). Reports near misses and collaborates with the interprofessional health care team to improve patient safety.
• Finance Essential Functions: Assists with patient and staffing needs (floats) across the service line or hospital as competencies allow. Utilizes time between heavy workloads efficiently. Utilizes resources with cost effectiveness and value creation in mind. Self-motivated to independently manage time effectively and prioritize daily tasks, minimizing incidental overtime, assisting coworkers as needed.
• Growth/Innovation Essential Functions: Offers innovative solutions in performance improvement projects and shared governance activities. Seeks opportunities to identify self-development needs on knowledge base, skill level and decision-making, as necessary, especially in areas of question, from preceptor and assigned licensed personnel and takes appropriate action. Ensures own career discussions occur with appropriate management. Completes and updates the My Development Plan on an on-going basis.