FARMINGTON – Each high school student attending was greeted with, “welcome, doctor,” handed a white lab coat and sent off to practice their suture techniques, diagnose a patient’s symptoms and find out how they can attend medical school.
On Monday, ten students from Spruce Mountain, Mt. Abram, Maranacook, Mt. Blue, Madison and Mountain Valley high schools attended the Doc4aDay program, an all-hands-on career exploration program held at Franklin Memorial Hospital.
Ali Hanson, a family practice resident at Maine Medical Center, taught Alex Dingus, a junior at Spruce Mountain High School, how to stitch a wound closed on a pig’s foot.
Starting with an anchor stitch, Dingus then carefully pulled the suture through in a crisscross pattern just under the skin. Her handiwork soon closed the cut.
“When you hide your suture like this, you can’t see any of the stitches,” Hanson pointed out.
In another room down the hall, Andrea Jones, a ninth-grade student at Mt. Blue High School, was tasked with diagnosing a patient who arrived in a confused state, all sweaty, shaky, and had an irregular heartbeat.
The “patient,” actually a fancy “sim-man” human model that can simulate everything from sweat to bumps on his belly, is prodded, while questions, with help from the surrounding real life emergency medical professionals, are asked.
Answering the questions as a patient might according to a scenario script is another trauma room nurse sitting on the other side of curtained screen.
Jones receives the patient’s blood test results.
“Sam, your blood sugar was really low,” Jones said, then she asks, “why are there marks on your tummy?” The “patient” explains that’s where he injects the insulin.
“Well, we’ll keep an eye on your blood sugar and you’ll probably go home later today,” the budding doctor announced and added, she’ll arrange for his plan of discharge.
The program, Doc4aDay, is held once each semester somewhere in Maine to encourage high school students who may have an interest in medicine the opportunity to experience hands-on simulated clinical activities and participate in a small group discussion with current medical students and residents. It also provides the opportunity to learn how to get from high school into medical school.
“The program is really to address the shortage of physicians in the state,” said Dr. Vicki Hayes, a family practice specialist in Portland, who coordinates the Doc4aDay program. “We want to educate students on the possibility of medical school.”
The Doc4aDay sprouted nearly three years ago in an association with the Maine Track program, which offers clinical training experiences here and exposes medical students to the unique aspects of rural practice as well as training in a major medical center. The program, a partnership between Maine Medical Center in Portland and Tufts University School of Medicine, have students spend the first two years on the Tufts campus in Boston then move to Maine for the third and fourth years.
“We want to provide high school students interested in medicine a pathway that works for them and then hopefully they’ll want to stay here,” Hayes said.
Lorri Brown, Area Health Education Center director at Franklin Memorial Hospital, coordinated the effort at the Farmington hospital for the second time. After contacting area high schools, the popular program, which is free to attend, had a waiting list of six students.
“We had a good response,” Brown said. She noted that there will be more opportunities for students interested in a medical field with the annual Scrub Club program held at FMH during the third week in June. The program offers much the same hands-on experience as Doc4aDay.
The week-long Scrub Club program, offered through a grant from the Area Health Education Center, is ope up to 50 students entering grades 8–12. Brown added that she can also set up a job shadowing experience for any students interested in learning more.
For more information about either program or to be added to the mailing list for the 2015 program, contact the Education Department at 779-2381 or email: ljbrown@fchn.org.
