NurseWeek: First Impressions: Partnership program offers students an eye-opening look at health care professions

First impressions
Partnership program offers students an eye-opening look at health care professions
By José Alaniz
August 28, 2000

Ditching the classroom for the emergency room, 100 high school students were able to see how important nursing is to health care. Some of them may even rethink their future career paths.

Photo: Photodisc


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All ears, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, the future stepped into the Veterans Administration Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System in May – just to have a look around. The future, in the guise of 100 students from various local high schools (both low-income and affluent), visited the OR, ER and several other departments, and sat in on some fun pictorial presentations put on by the nurses, as well as some videotapes.

They never lost interest for a second, said Ruby Laster, RN, nursing and human resources director for the system.

"They never got bored, I can tell you that, even though they were here for a few hours," Laster said. "They especially wanted to know about salaries, things like that. They were very practical-minded. I thought it was especially good that they got to see the male nurses. Some of the young men had never considered nursing as a career, so they had a lot of questions for them."

The students left with a much better sense of what it means to work in the health professions, and – stepping back onto the school bus – perhaps some of them reconsidered their career plans. Maybe some of them were thinking about their future for the first time.

If so, then the field trip’s organizers at UNITE-LA, a community-business-education partnership committed to school-to-career programs like this one, have succeeded. In the process, perhaps they will help end the nursing shortage. Established in 1996, UNITE-LA, which is made up of four consortia between industry and community-based organizations, strives to enhance young lives. At the same time, the organization augments the job pool by producing motivated, skilled workers via firsthand interaction.

Through in-class presentations and field trips for students as young as first grade, career fairs and "job shadowing" events for junior high and middle school students, and school- and work-based opportunities for older students, UNITE-LA has exposed more than 10,000 youngsters to the types of careers many of them may never have considered. Too often this is because no one ever suggested these careers to them, said June Levine, MSN, RN, director of the Health and Biotechnology Consortium for UNITE-LA.

"High school counselors don’t know where to direct kids for this information. They’re swamped with SATs, college admissions and things like that. In some high schools you might have one counselor for 4,000 students," Levine said. "And these counselors don’t have time to deal with ninth- and 10th-graders. So we are able to hook them up with the information they need, and encourage students to consider a career in the health professions."

And it’s not just the students who benefit, Levine said.

"The hospital staffs are so jazzed after a visit by the students. To see these young, interested faces acting so positively, asking questions – it puts new life into a hospital team, too. The public has tended to view nursing as not glamorous or well-paid in recent years, thanks to the media. Through these job shadowing programs we can undo some of that bad PR, and students can see for themselves what a great job it is," Levine said.

UNITE-LA represents more than 660 traditional school sites, 240 Los Angeles Unified School District learning centers, nine community colleges and more than 15 nonprofit and city agencies serving at-risk youth. Laster is especially pleased to see students from institutions such as Jordan High School in East Los Angeles.

"We’d love to do this again and expand it to include more students," she said. "We want to visit some of these middle schools for a career fair."

Bank of America, IBM, Kaiser Permanente and local television stations are among the more than 500 businesses that support UNITE-LA. Additional contributions come from the City of Los Angeles, the LAUSD, the AFL-CIO and others.

Although not too concerned about how the presidential elections might affect the program, Levine said that UNITE-LA’s $1.3 million federal grant has been dwindling every year. As with any such organization, survival depends on resourcefulness and cooperation with other nonprofits.

"Through UNITE-LA, we can build on each other’s progress and pool resources so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time," Levine said. "Corporations and sponsors have helped out a lot with in-kind donations as well."

Building the future one eye-opening, firsthand experience at a time isn’t cheap or easy – and given the stakes, maybe it shouldn’t be.