HILO — A real-life stroke alert from an incoming patient’s ambulance triggered a group of touring high school students to hustle out of Hilo Medical Center’s ER this week.
“That’s how we run here — we gotta just go, go, go,” said ER nurse Angela Kanae, keeping a pleasant attitude but undergoing an almost visible transformation from tour guide to emergency specialist. “Stroke is coming — we gotta go.”
With that, she disappeared into an exam room.
It was a striking moment that helped Hilo High School Health Services Pathway students learn what it’s really like to work in an ER.
The 10th-, 11th- and 12th-grade students are part of an effort to create a pipeline of young people interested in training for health-related jobs and to lessen shortages of health workers.
A Pre-Health Career Corps Program offered by the Area Health Education Center gives free after-school exposure in medical settings to students in the Pathways Program.
The goal of the Career Corps, the Pathways Program and of collaborators, like the hospital and Hilo Medical Center Foundation, is to get students actively engaged in medical education, exposed to health-career options and intrigued enough to eventually become health professionals.
The Pathways Program courses are held during regular school days. Career Corps events happen after school.
The hospital foundation received a $50,000 grant from the Hawaii Community Foundation covering two years of structured exposure to potential health-related jobs through programs such as school visits, the Career Corps and mentorships.
Those jobs are more diverse than students typically recognize before joining the Career Corps, or entering the health pathway.
They include careers such as radiologic technicians, biomedical engineers, athletic trainers, lab technicians, massage therapists, environmental-health specialists, dental assistants, medical librarians, embalmers, psychiatric aids, audiologists, pharmacists, epidemiologists, genetic counselors and dietitians.
The stroke alert sparked an interest in emergency medicine for Hilo High junior Laurie McGrath. It was her favorite part of the whole tour.
“I liked that we were able to see an activation,” she said later. “And that we were actually inside a real situation.”
She said she also enjoyed touring X-ray and CT areas — but emergency medicine was the most interesting to her. Emergency nursing is a field she might want to pursue.
Lisa Rantz, executive director of both the Area Health Education Center and of the hospital foundation, said collaboration has been essential to student-education efforts.
For example, hospital staff from the emergency department, short-stay unit, public relations and radiology collaborated Wednesday with the Area Health Education Center to hold the tour.
The high school’s Health Services Pathways instructor, Karin Tada, announced the opportunity to students at the high school and toured alongside the ones who took advantage of it.
Despite short notice, 10 students from Hilo High Health Services Pathway courses showed up for the after-class opportunity, demonstrating how enticing such health-related careers have become for school students throughout East Hawaii.
The hospital’s Mahealani Kane, a radiologic technician, gave the CT tour and explained that CT scans are different from X-rays because, with CT, the body’s internal organs can be differentiated.
“If the patient comes from the ER with stroke symptoms, we take the patient right away,” she said. “Time is of the essence when it comes to the brain.”
Kane encouraged students to volunteer at the hospital when they reach age 16. Younger students can volunteer through the foundation.
As a hospital student volunteer, she said, “you get a sense for the ins and outs of what we do.”
Students played the role of ER nurses by dressing in gloves, gowns and masks to prepare for a hypothetical mass-casualty incident.
When they finished getting dressed, the hospital’s director of quality, Tandy Newsome, asked if they were ready.
A couple of the students gave an enthusiastic yes.
But then Newsome asked if their gloves were snug enough to start an IV — causing some of the students to have epiphanies about ER nursing.
Email Jeff Hansel at jhansel@hawaiitribune-herald.com.