Health career day held at USU Eastern

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PRICE: Suturing, casting, taking blood pressures, and blood typing are activities you might expect to see taking place in a hospital. However, on March 15 , a few rooms at USU-Eastern Price Campus were transformed and inundated with high school students who had the opportunity to try their hands at all of those skills and a whole lot more.
Sponsored by Southern Utah AHEC, the Utah Hospital Association, and USU-Eastern Rural Health Scholars program, the health career day brought together 98 students from Carbon High, Emery High, Green River High and Pinnacle Canyon Academy. Students who attended were divided into groups and rotated among hands-on workshops.
At the Medical Technology Workshop, Bill Palmer, the Laboratory Directory at Castleview Hospital, explained careers available in the laboratory science field. Students also had the opportunity to do a hands-on blood typing activity.
Nurses from Castleview Hospital taught the participants how to suture. Students were taught basic suture knots and worked with suturing instruments as they sutured on chicken wings.
Pre-health profession students from the Rural Health Scholars program at USU-Eastern provided a casting workshop, where participants were taught how to put on a basic plaster cast. Students took turns putting casts on each other, and were then able to take their cast home with them.
The USU nursing program provided a hands-on nursing workshop. Stations were set-up and taught by USU-Eastern price campus nursing students and faculty. Participants spent time in the nursing department simulation lab and learned in a hands-on way what a career in nursing entails.
The University of Utah Division of Public Health provided a hands-on public health workshop. Students learned about epidemiology and were tasked with locating the source of a disease outbreak before it was too late.
Southern Utah AHEC coordinates these regional career fairs through support from the Utah Hospital Association. According to Rita Osborn, Executive Director of Southern Utah AHEC, “These career days are used as a way to expose kids from rural areas to health care careers. Rural areas have a harder time recruiting and maintaining their health care workforce. If we can help encourage students from rural areas to pursue health care for their careers, they will be more inclined to come back to rural areas to work.”