<p>I volunteer at the hospital about 5hr/week. all i do is pull up charts, make files, and hand in the sign-in sheets to patients.</p>
<p>is this what most volunteers are doing ? just wondering</p>
<p>It's a way to get your foot in the door, but I would try to do something a little more interactive with patients. Volunteering in a nursing home, for instance, gives you a lot more patient contact.</p>
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I volunteer at the hospital about 5hr/week. all i do is pull up charts, make files, and hand in the sign-in sheets to patients.
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I volunteer at the ER and this seems about right; In addition, i give patients whatever they need like blanket, water, e.g. Make the beds. You know what you can do is just ask the nurses or the EMTs if you can just follow them around as they take the patients and occasionally the patients would talk to you.</p>
<p>I second the nursing home/non-hospital route. After over 500 hours of volunteering during HS, I learned my lesson. Shadowing and/or being an EMT is so much better in terms of being immersed in a clinical environment.</p>
<p>EMT is much better.</p>
<p>Just being a candy striper is better than sitting at home doing nothing, but...</p>
<p>See if you can get a job as a phlebotomist.</p>
<p>^ becoming a phlebotomist isn't as easy today as it once was, at least in CA (and I would imagine elsewhere). Where it used to be a "learn on the job" type thing, you are now required to have a lot of training and supervised venipunctures of various types before you get certified. </p>
<p>Around where I used to live in LA, the phlebotomy classes were more expensive than the EMT classes! lol</p>
<p>But if you have the time ( :cough: summer :cough: ), take either the EMT or phlebotomy class and get a job doing that during the year. Either one would give you amazing clinical exposure. Phlebotomy would likely be more hospital-based and less based on assessment and treatment of patients than EMS, but you would get to see the hospital "process" as it were and work as part of the healthcare team in that setting. EMS is a whole different ballgame...</p>