Being Honest With Nursing School: The Importance of Being CPR Certified

Now, throughout your nursing school journey your program probably requires you to become CPR certified to some level. Personally, my school requires us to be BLS certified, where we take a one day course and have tutorials on how to perform Adult, Child, and Infant CPR. 

Being CPR certified is extremely important in the healthcare field because anything can happen at any moment, and it is best to be prepared when you are in the thick of things. 

However, if you are a pre-nursing student or your school does not have strict rules on CPR certification - this post is designed to inform you about the importance of becoming and remaining CPR certified. 

Pre-nursing Students:

Before I entered nursing school I volunteered at a local hospital on the weekends. My job was to sit at the nurses station on the OB unit and answer phone calls or open the locked facility to visitors. During this time I was not CPR certified, nor was it a requirement of the volunteer program at that facility. However, looking back it would have been beneficial to be CPR certified because I was working in the hospital setting. 

Although there thankfully were not any codes on my particular unit, there were volunteers that were placed all over the hospital. Having knowledge in basic life supporting tactics is very important in the healthcare field. Also, if you enter a CPR certification class now you will have more experience under your belt and that always looks good when you are applying to nursing programs. 

Nursing Students: 

As a nursing student there are very obvious reasons as to why CPR certification is important. When you enter clinical you are considered one of the main men on the scene - which means that if the professionals recognize that you are in the room during that hectic situation, they very well might pull you in to start doing chest compressions. 

Throughout my several semesters of clinical I have seen two codes occur. Both were resolved successfully and I was not pulled into the situation to help (things get very hectic and sometimes when there's an entire tribe of people in the room, it's perfectly okay to step back and observe as a student). However, in the back of my mind it was very comforting to know that if I had been asked to step in the line up to do chest compressions - I would have known how to do them and would feel competent in stepping up to the plate. 

Nurses: 

You might think to yourself: "Michelle, Nurses? Why are you even discussing this group - it should be a given". 

Yes, nurses are certainly required to be CPR certified and have several other specific certifications tacked onto that in case of emergencies depending on the unit they are on. However, I have had one experience last semester where I was able to see that sometimes important certifications can slip through the cracks in management, and it is always best to be prepared. 


In this particular instance I was doing my CRT location on a Same Day Surgery unit in a hospital. This particular Same Day Surgery unit was specifically not allowed to take pediatric patients because they did not have the resources to properly care for them if an emergency were to arise. However, this hospital took pediatric patients anyway (albeit a few) and not one regularly scheduled nurse on that unit was PALS certified. The nurses that were not regularly scheduled and had a PALS background stated that they had not been re-certified in approximately ten years.

Now, this did not sit well with me because there were actual pediatric patients on the unit periodically. I am a firm believer in that if you are a Registered Nurse, that you should be able to take care of any patient that you will come in contact with. 

This situation really turned sour when the nurse manager of the unit decided to run a surprise mock code that was being recorded without everyone's permission. Now, that probably was not the best way to go about conducting a teaching exercise such as this, but it happened nonetheless. The nurses invovled were completely put on the spot and had no idea what to do in the case that was being presented. All of the different care teams (the ER rapid response team, the residents, social work, etc) all came to the event to assist in the scenario, but it was certainly did not flow smoothly.

The lesson that that experience taught me is that all health care providers truly need to know life-saving measures in emergencies for the patients that they are taking care of. 

Overall, I think that CPR is a very important skill to learn how to do. Anything can happen at any moment in life - at a commonplace store or in a hospital unit. A truely great healthcare provider knows the steps it takes to help someone. I think it is best to learn those skills early so over time you can improve upon them every time you get re-certified.   


Thank you so much for reading this post! I am so blessed to have been able to run this blog and give you information about nursing school and speak about my past experiences. 

- Michelle
#BSNbabe