I am a CNA and recently finished the NATP program at Valley Health. I have experience in both long term care and the hospital setting. During my NATP clinicals, we spent time in both the long term care setting and hospital setting. As I understand, the current rule has a mandatory long term care setting clinical rotation. This is not entirely feasible. COVID has created an issue with interacting with patient in a long term setting and to be honest it does not give you a lot of diversity of the type of patients that you will encounter. By engaging in the same routine care of patients, CNAs can become stagnant in their skills and quite frankly that is dangerous for our long term care population. I have seen this first hand. Also, I do have hospital experience as a CNA, which is most of my professional career. The hospital setting gives you the ability to see different patients on a routine basis and allows the chance to use different skills daily making the CNA well rounded. Additionally, the CNA has the ability to learn new skills that she would necessarily not be able to learn in the long term care setting. Personally, I was able to learn to do bladder scanners on patients. This is something that I do not think I would have had the opportunity to do in the long term care setting. Sadly, by making the long term care rotation mandatory, you are creating a pigeon hole and limiting us for doing more for our patients. I hope you take this into consideration from someone who is working in the trenches as a CNA and nursing student.