Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dan Onorato was in Philadelphia on Thursday for some hands-on experience to find out what it was like to be a certified nursing Canidate assistant.

KYW’s Paul Kurtz reports that it wasn’t your standard glad-handing, baby-kissing, boilerplate campaign appearance. Onorato accepted an offer from the Service Employees International Union to shadow one of it’s members, a certified nursing assistant, at a nursing home in Northeast Philadelphia.

“I did get a different perspective. You could just see how much work’s involved. How these CNA”s are constantly moving. The skills and the physical requirement it takes to do their job. Plus the mental requirement because you’re dealing with people that have a lot of issues. Some of them are physical, some of them are mental, some of them are both.”

Onorato says the next governor will have to address some thorny budgetary issues for one of the oldest populations in America.