 With help from the National Youth
Leadership Forum, St. Mary’s helps high school students explore health
care careers
For the past two summers Pat Piepoli, a clinical recruiter
for St. Mary’s Hospital in rural Leonardtown, has coordinated a day-long
visit that covers six hospital departments for a group of high school students
from across the country. Why? After all, it takes quite a bit of
behind-the-scenes work to make it happen, from getting permission from any
patients with whom students may interact to lining up things with department
leaders.
Piepoli explains why: “We do it because we think
it’s important for these students—all of whom have excellent academic
records and who have expressed an interest in a health care career—to see
medical procedures in different departments and to get a sense of patient care
in a community-focused hospital like St. Mary’s.” Piepoli notes that
80 percent of the hospital’s employees live within the southern Maryland
county for which it is named. “Often, we’re on a first-name basis
with our patients. While that close relationship can make an experience more
comfortable for them, it also keeps us on our toes—we’re likely to
get personal feedback about how they were treated here.”
The organization that brings the students to the
Baltimore-Washington area for ten days (and that arranges their health
care-related visits to a wide range of hospitals, research facilities, and
medical schools) is the National Youth Leadership Forum on Medicine—
NYLF/MED. Founded in 1992, the forum’s mission is to give young people a
real-life taste of the diverse areas that make up a medical career, as well as
exposure to the evolving ethical and legal issues in the field. The program
also explains the clinical practice and educational requirements for entering
various medical professions. (NYLF conducts similar programs to introduce
students to other professions as well, from law and diplomacy, to anthropology
and engineering.)
Piepoli notes that many of the students start out wanting to
be doctors. Several who visited St. Mary’s expressed a serious interest in
becoming surgeons and were allowed to witness a surgical procedure. She notes,
however, that the experience may have an unintended result. “Sometimes
going into the OR and seeing an operation can change their minds; they may end
up pursuing a different medical career.”
While leadership forum staff have just begun tracking how
many students in the medical forum go on to health care careers, the
program’s D.C. director Victor Hall notes that of the 16 advisors who
supervised NYLF/MED students last summer, five were program alumni now in
medical school.
Piepoli says that while preparing for the students’
visit does take careful planning, they are wonderfully appreciative and
enthusiastic about the experience. At St. Mary’s, students visited the
emergency department, peri-operative, (“We give them a certain spot to
stand in; if a procedure gets too overwhelming, they can either sit down or
leave the room”), radiology, laboratory, respiratory therapy, and
rehabilitation medicine. The attention to detail in setting it all up is worth
it, she says, when the hospital receives the students’ evaluation
comments—she cites an example from last summer: “Everyone was so kind
and answered all our questions. They have such passion for their jobs, and
confidence, too.”
With such positive responses, would it be so surprising if
someday one of the visiting students returns as a health professional?
Contacts:
Pat Piepoli
Recruiter
St.
Mary’s Hospital
Phone: 301-475-7003
E-mail:
Pat_Piepoli@smhwecare.com
Web Site SMHWECARE.
COM
Victor Hall
Program Director, Washington DC
National
Youth Leadership Forum
Phone: 202/777-4096
E-mail: vhall@nylf.org
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