The most effective health care education is often not in classrooms, but in clinics.
On Friday, five Rogers High School students gathered around a bed in the simulation lab in the Sacred Heart Doctors’ Building. A manikin named Pat was flat on its back in a hospital bed.
“In this scenario, we are going to pretend that we are in a long-term care facility and we have our patient and there’s been a change of status and so they have to be taken away by ambulance with paramedics," said registered nurse Crystal Garcia.
"I came in and he was clutching his chest. He doesn’t have any heart problems, I don’t think, and he usually is really good at breathing and normally he talks to me. He’s able to answer all of my questions, but he wasn’t able to talk to me and then he just slumped,” she said.
Garcia’s role-play partner is paramedic Jim Akramoff. He looks over at one of the students.
“What I’m going to have you do, Michael, I’m going to have you step around here and I’m going to have you hold this mask like this," Akramoff said. "Kind of pull the face up and push the mask down and then I’m going to have you squeeze this every six seconds.”
This is the students’ chance to learn about basic health care in a safe environment and ask questions of their two guides.
In this and adjacent rooms, Providence officials such as Anna Franklin have created five simulation scenarios, designed to introduce this group of high school students to health care careers.
“It means introducing health care in a way that is actionable. It’s interactive and it really can touch the hearts and the souls of our students, especially if they’ve never considered health care as a career before," said Anna Franklin, the Providence chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer for eastern Washington and Montana.
This event was also co-sponsored by the Spokane chapter of the NAACP as a way to interest students of color and begin to introduce more diversity into the health care workforce.
“It gives them that feeling of what does it look like, what does it feel like. I can actually do this. It’s planting that seed of hope. It’s planting that seed of inspiration," said Lisa Gardner, first vice president for the NAACP's Spokane chapter.
"That diversity really matters and having that opportunity for our patients to be reflected in the caregiver team so that they feel heard, they feel safe, that they feel listened to and to overall impact the health of our community," Franklin said.
This was the first in-person student visit to Sacred Heart since before the pandemic. Franklin says Providence officials plan to increase the frequency of these events.
