This Memphis area hospital is giving high schoolers an inside look at healthcare jobs. Here's how.

Initially, 17-year-old Eliza Sawyer wanted to be a nurse, like her mother. She had a desire to help people, and she enjoyed caring for her grandfather. A job as a nurse seemed fitting.

But as Sawyer entered her senior year at Bartlett High School, she also wanted to get a clearer picture of what working in healthcare looked like. So, she applied for a slot in the shadowing program run by Bartlett High and St. Francis Hospital-Bartlett. And in October, she began to follow healthcare professionals at the hospital twice a week.

Though she wanted to be a nurse, Sawyer didn’t just observe nurses. She followed respiratory therapists and X-ray technicians. She spent time in just about every section of the hospital, from the ER and the ICU to the operating room and post-acute care area.

Sawyer’s time shadowing at St. Francis-Bartlett is slated to end in March, and her five months in the program have impacted her career ambitions and taught her more about healthcare. These days, she doesn't just want to be a nurse; she wants to be a nurse practitioner focused on women’s health. She has developed an interest in pharmacy and how medicines can serve people. She better understands the importance of being kind to patients.

“When you treat people with kindness,” she said, “They treat you that same way.”

And she has enjoyed discussing her experiences with the other members of the program, as Sawyer is far from the only Bartlett High student shadowing healthcare professionals at the hospital.

Learning about new professions

Currently, the program contains 16 Bartlett High students, who had to fill out 15-page applications to get accepted. All of them are seniors, and since October, they’ve been spending about two hours a week at the hospital. Some of them shadow staffers from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays, while the rest of them come at the same time on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

As part of the program, the students take a class that runs the duration of the school year, and their rotations in the hospital began in October and end in March. Like Sawyer, the rest of the students have observed people that have a variety of positions and work throughout the hospital – which is part of the point.

The goal is to expose students to professions they otherwise wouldn’t have thought about. Sure, they learn more about being a doctor or nurse. But that's just the beginning.

“People talk about, ‘What is speech therapy? What is an occupational therapist? What's respiratory therapy,” said Christopher Jenkins, the chief operating officer of St. Francis-Bartlett. “These students come in, and they get exposed to all those things… They get a chance to shadow people that they would have never known about, had it not been for this program.”

The partnership's origins

The program was launched in 2018. St. Francis-Bartlett’s leaders were looking for more ways to work with the community, and wanted to find a way to partner with Bartlett City Schools – where many of their staffers had students.

Already, the hospital had partnerships with local colleges and universities. But how neat would it be, they thought, to reach students before they entered the higher education landscape?

When Bartlett High staffers approached them with the idea of the student-shadowing program, they said yes without hesitation.

The program launched with fewer than 10 students. It wasn’t long before Bartlett High and St. Francis-Bartlett had to pause the program because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But in fall 2021, they re-launched it, and now, the partnership seems to be in stronger shape than ever.

'A good steppingstone'

The partnership hasn’t just exposed students to numerous healthcare professions. It’s given them a better understanding of the field itself.

“They get to really see every aspect of what happens to a patient,” said Erin Ozment, the clinical internship instructor for St. Francis-Bartlett. “They have seen patients having CPR performed. They've seen patients on Mechanical ventilators. They'll see patients just on the regular floor. They've been back into the OR [operating room] and have witnessed surgeries.”

The shadowing isn’t always easy; Ozment noted that on rare occasion students have passed out after seeing massive wounds. But the students have also gotten to see special moments. They get to see patients getting discharged after long stays. They’ll see something, Ozment explained, that “is really amazing and inspires them.”

And after they complete the program, students can have a better idea of whether healthcare is for them.

“It's important, because it gives students the opportunity to really look into healthcare as a profession,” Ozment said. “A lot of people like the idea of going into healthcare, but once they start going into different medical programs through school, they realize it's not for them. This is a good steppingstone for the kids because they can take a school year and realize whether they are really interested in health care or not without spending any money.”

John Klyce covers education and children's issue. He can be reached at [email protected]

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: How a Bartlett hospital is exposing high schoolers to healthcare jobs