Where Do LPNs Work?: 7 Facilities That Employs LPNs
With all the medical advancements and specializations, not to mention the continuing need for health care professionals, the nursing field has expanded since the days of Florence Nightingale.
Registered nurses aren’t the only kinds of nurses anymore. Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs), and Licensed Vocational Nurses (LVNs also known as Licensed Practical Nurses LPN), populate the medical landscape, as do specialty personnel.
LPNs have a wide variety of opportunities in their career paths, so let’s look at the facilities where LPNs work.
What Is an LPN?
A Licensed Practical Nurse can get into nursing with less extensive education than a Registered Nurse (RN).
LPNs manage the day-to-day care of patients, caring for them, ensuring their comfort, and collecting data for doctors and RNs.
While an RN may aid in some treatments and tests, the LPN focuses on the patient, helping them dress, bathe, and move to and from the bathroom. They may also insert catheters, relay patient concerns to doctors or RNs, maintain health records for a patient, and discuss patients’ care with them. Under supervision, LPNs can also administer medications.
Where the typical RN has spent time at a university studying in and completing a four-year program, a candidate can complete an LPN program in as little as 12 months.
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7 Facilities Where LPNs work
Where can LPNs work other than a hospital? Here are seven possible career paths, though this is not a definitive list.
1. Hospitals
When people ask, “Can LPNs work in hospitals?” the answer is yes, as the bulk of their duties align with what happens in hospitals. Doctors and RNs welcome the assistance LPNs provide, as the responsibilities mentioned above free them to oversee the care of more patients.
Many nursing candidates start their careers as LPNs. Working in a hospital gives an LPN extensive opportunities for hands-on learning.
Record-keeping is essential, so at a hospital, LPNs track patient records, vital to the hospital’s operation and the patient’s care.
No one wants to be in the hospital, so the LPN stands on the front line of helping those who find themselves hospitalized remain as calm and comfortable as possible.
2. Nursing homes
Where can LPNs work? Lots of places. Where are they perhaps most valued? Nursing homes and extended care facilities. Residents of nursing homes often live there because they have grown incapable of meeting their own needs regarding hygiene, feeding themselves, and living comfortable lives.
LPNs offer nursing home residents the assistance they need, and this goes back to the whole idea of making sure patients are comfortable as LPNs do in hospital settings.
Families who place their aging loved ones in facilities like these hope their relatives will receive care and be comfortable and happy in their surroundings. An LPN plays a direct role in ensuring this is the case for every nursing home resident.
Since nursing home facilities don’t have one doctor per patient, the doctors and RNs who see and treat nursing home patients need someone to monitor the health of the patients they do have. LPNs meet this need, and they can also dispense medication.
3. Clinics
A place like an urgent care clinic aims to take some of the load off of emergency rooms and provide patients with care when, for instance, their primary care physician is out of the office or after office hours.
Since clinics focus on specific medical issues (there are addiction services clinics, dialysis clinics, sexual health, mental health, and specialized clinics, to name a few), they rely on the services of LPNs to maintain communications between doctors and patients. Some common duties that an LPN may have in a clinic include:
Checking and recording vital signs;
Changing dressings for wounds;
Collecting blood or urine samples;
Helping to assist with examinations;
Performing routine lab tests.
4. Insurance companies
LPNs employed by insurance companies spend less time caring for acutely ill patients. Instead, an insurance company LPN will spend days on data entry, making follow-up calls to discharged patients, and documenting insurance denials and authorizations.
This is an office position, and other than in rare cases, an insurance company LPN will have little face-to-face interaction with patients. However, they are intrinsic to the process. Doctors, RNs, and patients all have to communicate information to insurance companies, and an LPN in the office can be invaluable in ensuring that communication happens.
Some insurance companies employ LPNs as traveling staff, and they may do follow-up work with patients in their homes. The LPN may collect blood and urine samples or screen for medical issues that may be present.
5. Rehab facilities
As a place where managed care is ongoing but usually has an end date, rehab facilities depend on LPNs to do much of the same things they do in other settings. In addition to recording patient history, administering meds, and taking vital signs, LPNs in rehab facilities help with patient movement— not just into and out of bed. Still, in the case of physical rehabilitation, the patient's movements are there to recover or improve upon.
Many rehab spots have Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs), and their supervision falls directly under LPNs. You might say the CNAs help the LPNs, and the LPNs help the RNs. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but it covers the general idea.
One critical duty of the rehab LPN goes beyond monitoring a patient's physical well-being. They also spend time observing the mental health of the rehab patients. Rehab patients can face a long battle, negatively affecting their mental health. Without the LPN's observation (and emotional support), the mental distress might otherwise go unnoticed.
6. Doctor’s office
When you go see your family doctor, one of the first things they do is weigh you and take your vital signs. The last person who did this for you was most likely an LPN.
Depending on the size of the office staff, LPNs may also take medical histories, enter data into patient health records, give vaccinations, and even apply casts for broken bones.
The office LPN may also be the health care professional who asks you to fill in all those charts when you get to the doctor’s office, and in some cases, they may also answer the phones there. A doctor's office may provide a variety of duties for an LPN since there are so many tasks in private medical practice (some medically related and some not) and only so many staff members to deal with them all.
7. Schools
While most states in the US require their school nurses to be RNs, that doesn't mean that there’s not a place for LPNs in school settings. In fact, since 1990, when mainstreaming became widespread in American schools, many school nursing staffs found themselves overwhelmed with the medical needs of some disabled students brought into the school by the mainstreaming push.
Without LPNs, school nurses are hard-pressed to keep up with the needs of some of the special needs students peopling schools and keeping up with the students with whom they were interacting before mainstreaming brought more students with different needs to their offices.
Many LPNs find themselves on the front lines of dealing with medically at-risk students. Perhaps a child has a colostomy bag or tracheotomy. These medical devices need care and maintenance by someone other than the patient. In today’s schools, an LPN’s work is essential to the students' health and the ability of the school nurse to administer care to the entire student body.
LPNs also spend time in school settings monitoring vaccination records, interacting with students and parents, and looking after the general well-being of the students.
Wrapping Up
The career path for an LPN has many branches. Whether you pursue the certification as a stepping stone to another type of medical profession or as an end goal, you will have many options for where you work and the types of duties you’ll be asked to perform.
In almost all LPN positions, you’ll spend time with patients, collecting vital signs and information for other medical staff members and ensuring that the patient is comfortable.