Hi, my name is Drew Garner. I'm one of the Health Science teachers here at Turner High School. Five years ago I had a student come up and ask me a couple of weeks before she graduated. If I remember what I told her about becoming a nurse during her health class or freshman year. I told her this was four years ago and I talked a lot about different types of health care careers in health class, but she was really specific about wanting to get into nursing school. So next couple of weeks we looked at what schools in the area offered the program that she was interested in. The next year I had five or six students come up and ask me the same types of questions about how to apply for schools, what schools had certain programs or degrees, and all of this kind led to starting the Health Science pathway here at the high school. So that's my WHY as to getting into the health care Health Science pathway. We have now started and turned it into a podcast and YouTube channel. This is going to act as our guest speaker library for our current and future health care careers. Students that are interested in getting into a healthcare profession.
I wanted students to be able to learn a lot about the different varieties of aspects of health care professions, not just that there are nurses and doctors, but when we started to talk about getting guest speakers to come into school, wanted to look at a variety of different health care professions. So we came up with the five pillars of things that our students wanted to learn about. The first was careers in healthcare, sports medicine, like? What are the different careers there are that everybody is not just a nurse or doctor? We wanted to learn from the experiences of former students from the high school, so people that had graduated maybe 5-6 seven years ago. What they were doing in college to further educate themselves as well as get into their professions and learn their processes and.
The skills that they learned in high school and college could have helped them with their current profession. We also wanted to hear from instructors and professors from colleges and universities that we're teaching these classes. They wanted to learn about the pathways, how many credit hours there were, what classes were like you know, just the ends and outs of college, and what to expect. Some of the non-traditional pathways of getting into healthcare career fields. Maybe it's starting out as a CNA. Working your way up while continuing your education while working in a hospital. Students also were interested in what continuing education was available for them as professionals and any health care career events that were happening for them that they could go to.
