The Healthcare Travelling Roadshow opened the eyes of several Peter Skene Ogden Secondary School students to potential careers in healthcare.
On Wednesday, May 17 the show was set up in PSO’s gym with stations on dental hygiene, medical laboratory science, medicine, nursing, occupational therapy and pharmacy. Manning them were three University of British Columbia staff members and 11 healthcare students.
“The post-secondary students bring their perspective of the healthcare field to the high school and are able to connect to the students, kind of peer to peer almost because they’re the same age, very close in age,” said Sonya Kruger, communications officer for the division of medical sciences and UNBC.
For PSO students Emily Tinney and Breanna Whyte the presentation helped open their eyes to the medical community.
“I’ve wanted to be a doctor since I was four,” said Whyte. “This presentation kind of like solidified where I want to go in life.”
The field of healthcare is a more recent interest for Tinney. “It was not a community that I had considered until recently so it definitely helped my decisions.”
Her favourite table was pharmacy which she already had an interest in but she also found the dental and occupation therapy displays interesting.
The two laughed as they said they killed the ‘patient’ the first couple of times they tried intubating him at the medical display. “But we saved him the third time,” said Whyte.
Originally the idea of Dr. Sean Maurice with the UBC Northern Medical Program at UNBC, the roadshow first started touring in 2010.
“We try to go every year doing two in May, doing three to five different communities. We usually take about five years to get back to a certain community, but we had a two-year pandemic that threw us off,” he said in an interview with the Black Press Media.
The roadshow is delivered in partnership with the Northern Medical Programs Trust, Rural Education Action Plan, Interior Health, UNBC, and UBC Faculty of Medicine.
Second-year medical student Joel O’Brien said he was accepted at the UNBC as an out-of-province student. “It’s been an adventure coming to BC and getting to know this awesome province.”
He got involved in the roadshow as part of his medical program education. Students are required to do 180 hours of Flex which is designed to add to their overall education.
“I thought I would love to go into some middle schools or high schools and just talk to students and just kind of tell my story to students,” he said. “When I was coming up, I think in Grade 10, there were a few medical students from the University of Alberta they came and they just chatted with us about medical school.”
He thought it was so cool at the time and later realized he wanted to share his experiences in the same way.
Maurice said the university knows it is important to get out into the communities to promote healthcare professions with rural youth.
“If students from rural areas go to university or college and train for health care they are more likely to return to their communities to work or another smaller community which is so important for rural health,” he said.
O’Brien said one of his biggest reasons for getting into medicine is he knew he could take it anywhere.
“I can go to any small town and I can become a member of that community, I can get to know that whole community and I can make it my home.”
With files from Monica Lamb-Yorski
fiona.grisswell@100milefreepress.net
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