Health care organizations reach out to students

A group of Weyauwega-Fremont Middle School students took a recent field trip to tour the diabetes research facilities and visit with researchers at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison.

"The students got to do an experiment, as well as look at slides under a microscope," said Dr. Dawn Belt Davis, assistant professor in the Department of Medicine and Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at the University of Wisconsin. "They also toured the research labs, and researchers conducted presentations about what they're currently working on."

The trip was just one of a myriad of opportunities that today's middle and high school students have to explore potential careers in the health care field.

UW also offers its annual Expanding Your Horizons, a fall program geared toward middle school-age girls who are interested in careers in science or medicine.

Closer to home, the Fox Valley's largest health care organizations have collaborated for more than a decade to give students insight to various health care professions.

Started in 2004 by a group of area health care providers and educational facilities, the Fox Valley Health Care Alliance (FVHCA) is an organization aiming to better serve the health care workforce and education needs of a seven-county area in northeastern Wisconsin. Members include the area's largest health care providers, Affinity Health System, Agnesian Healthcare, Aurora Health Care and ThedaCare, various educational institutions, including Fox Valley Technical College, Marian University and the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, plus other relevant community organizations.

Davis called UW's Expanding Your Horizons program a great way to reach out to girls pondering careers in medicine.

"Girls from across the state sign up and come down for a full day at the university, where they go and learn about medical careers that they're interested in, as well as what those people do for their day-to-day jobs," Davis said.

Expanding Your Horizons is well received by the staff, as it gives researchers and doctors the opportunity to share some of their personal history, answer questions and inspire adolescents. It's one of the few programs that target young girls.

"I think one of the most important things the girls get is the opportunity to see that, number one, women can do this as a career," Davis said. "They have role models they can look up to."

The FVHCA, meanwhile, has proven to be an efficient and effective way for health care organizations to meet the needs of students.

"A lot of people wonder how we could effectively team up, as we're competitors," said Jen Meyer, education consultant at ThedaCare. "But the alliance is a group of such passionate and positive people that we're able to let go of any competition in order to make it easier for students to learn more and be successful in future health care careers."

Since its start, the Fox Valley Health Care Alliance has been looked upon as a model for the state, and many other states have reached out for information in order to explore creating their own alliance to benefit the future of their health care systems, Meyer said.

The FVHCA was started out of a need to streamline the process of assisting students who are interested in health care careers.

"When we first came together, everyone was overwhelmed with calls about opportunities for students," Meyer said. "We figured out how many individual or group requests for job shadows that everyone was getting, and it ended up being about 800 per year."

Before the FVHCA was launched, all of the facilities would receive individual requests for job shadows.

"Those are very time and staff intensive," Meyer said. "A lot of times, a school would require them, so a student would reach out to a health care organization, even if they weren't necessarily truly interested in a health care career. They were just meeting a requirement."

So at one of the first meetings of the FVHCA, the alliance met with high school health occupation teachers and guidance counselors to determine what could be done to meet the needs of students without consistently stripping health care organizations of their staff time and resources.

Now the alliance hosts career experience events for area high school students.

The career experience events are regular offerings that students can sign up for. The experiences are three hour, interactive events that feature three different health care career areas. For example, ThedaCare's upcoming experience on April 15 will highlight careers as a registered nurse, certified registered nurse anesthetist and a surgical technician.

Each of the big four health care providers in the area offers two experiences per semester. In addition, the partnering educational institutions offer one experience per semester. The health care or educational facility gets to select the date, time and location of their experience, as well as the three different areas they want to showcase. Students can browse the FVHCA website to find the career offerings that interest them, and then sign up for that specific event. The events are capped at 45 students.

The experiences place a big emphasis on educating students in a way that is very hands-on and highly interactive.

"The hands-on portion is so positive, and has actually ended up being better than a job shadow for most students," Meyer said. "Job shadows are strictly hands-off. Students aren't allowed to touch patients or any equipment."

But at the career experience events students are encouraged to actively participate in tasks such as putting on a surgical gown and gloves while maintaining a sterile environment.

"The events have been very well received, and the students are also much more engaged because they're learning about careers that they're actually legitimately interested in," Meyer said.

These events have taken some pressure off of the health care organizations, as they act as a prerequisite for job shadows.

"Students now have to attend a career experience event in order to request a job shadow," Meyer said. "If they've attended and are really interested in learning more about that particular career field, they can fill out an application to do a one-on-one job shadow."

Beyond easing the load on health care institutions, the greatest benefit of these events is the opportunity to effectively connect students with varying careers in science and medicine.

All health care organizations agree that this is an incredibly important mission.

"Health care facilities want and need to have good, highly skilled workers," Meyer said. "So providing opportunities for students can help them make decisions about their future careers and their college choice."

It's a winning proposition for the health care organizations as well.

"There has been a lot of research that suggests that getting students interested at a relatively young age is critical for making sure that they get that spark and get excited about science and medicine," Davis said. "These opportunities are part of getting them started on a path to choose the right courses, and prepare for opportunities."

Online

More information about the Fox Valley Health Care Alliance can be found at www.fvhca.org.