Skip to main content

Lowcountry AHEC Partners with Local High School to Provide Online Health Career Modules

Lowcountry AHEC is partnering with Colleton County High School’s Cougar New Tech Entrepreneurial Academy to provide online health career modules to students in the New Tech Health Careers Academy. This collaboration has taken AHEC into new territory, adapting content that was previously disseminated in-person during an after-school program for high school students. As an after-school program, 20-30 students from grades nine through 12 attended the meetings conducted at Lowcountry AHEC in Walterboro. Now, by partnering with the Colleton County High School (CCHS), Lowcountry AHEC’s health careers program will work with 92 freshmen participating in their first year of the academy. The workshops that were previously conducted after school are delivered online with supplemental activities taking place as part of the school day. Each year Lowcountry AHEC will work with a new set of freshmen matriculating at CCHS, in addition to the current students progressing through their sophomore, junior and senior years.

Lowcountry AHEC Center Director Diane Mathews said that the new modality for introducing students to diverse health care careers is a pilot program that will hopefully become a way to extend workshops and programming to more high school students across the state in the near future. The online format will allow students who previously faced barriers to joining Lowcountry AHEC’s Health Careers Academy (work commitments, transportation logistics, etc.) more flexibility to participate in the program’s workshops, since they can be done online from a tablet, laptop or computer.

Lowcountry AHEC has transformed one office at their Walterboro center into a recording studio where Health Careers Program Coordinator Jalacy Green is producing video presentations, voice-overs, and other web-based information for the students to access from school or home. For this school year, Lowcountry AHEC, in collaboration with South Carolina AHEC staff from across the state, is producing six educational modules for the students. Each month Ms. Green will facilitate health care related activities at CCHS during the school day. Ms. Green said the program’s five career clusters — Biotechnology Research and Development, Health Informatics, Therapeutic Services, Support Services and Diagnostic Services — contain multiple career options for students to consider. Both CCHS administrators and Lowcountry AHEC want the students to be exposed to as many of these health careers as possible.

Lowcountry AHEC believes that these modules will provide students with the tools and information they need to begin considering a path toward a health profession career. Lowcountry AHEC is excited to provide content for the New Tech Health Careers Academy and help their students get started on their health care journey.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lowcountry AHEC Helps School Nurse Orientation Pivot Online during Pandemic

For many years, orientation for school nurses in South Carolina has been an in-person event; however, due to COVID-19, this orientation, like so many other in-person events, was cancelled this past year. Yet the need to orient South Carolina's school nurses remains critical. Recognizing this need, a team consisting of Lowcountry AHEC staff, South Carolina Association of School Nurse President Dawn MacAdams and South Carolina Department of Education State School Nurse Consultant Vicky Ladd developed a plan to deliver the orientation as an online, self-paced course. The instructors supported the format change, working to convert their in-person sessions to online content, and Lowcountry AHEC will provide nursing credit for the series over the next two years. The orientation went live in the fall of 2020 and is available at no cost to South Carolina school nurses on the new and improved South Carolina AHEC Learning Portal. To find out more and register, visit the Foundations of School
Post a Comment
Read more

SC AHEC Excellence Awards: Gateway Award

The South Carolina AHEC Gateway Award recognizes individuals who are committed to furthering the development of future health professionals and are distinguished in their service to students in the health careers pipeline. This year’s Gateway Award recipient is Angelica Ellman Christie, Ed.D.  Dr. Christie is currently the vice president of academic affairs at Denmark Technical College. Previously, she served in the South Carolina AHEC system for numerous years: She started her career in 1998 as the Health Careers Program (HCP) coordinator for Greenville AHEC and advanced as the HCP director in the South Carolina AHEC program office in 2000. In the fall of 2018, Dr. Christie left South Carolina AHEC for her position at Denmark Tech. Throughout her career, Dr. Christie exhibited her passionate dedication to advancing the mission of South Carolina AHEC. She enthusiastically went above and beyond to research, develop, and successfully undertake new projects and programming to streng
Post a Comment
Read more

South Carolina AHEC Welcomes Katie Gaul as New Office for Healthcare Workforce Director and Recognizes Linda Lacey's 10 Years of Service to the State

Katie Gaul The South Carolina AHEC Program welcomes Katie Gaul as the new director of the South   Carolina Office for Healthcare Workforce and bids a fond farewell to Linda Lacey, who will be retiring at the end of the year.  Linda joined South Carolina AHEC in 2009 as the founding director of the South Carolina Office for Healthcare Workforce (SCOHW), which received startup funding from The Duke Endowment. SCOHW works closely with other state agencies and health-related organizations to ensure they have the information they need about the healthcare workforce in South Carolina and the issues affecting the future of that workforce. During her tenure, Linda established the South Carolina Health Professions Data Book – a widely used resource that describes the available healthcare workforce, population, health status and social/economic conditions in each county in the state. Updated every two years, the data book was recognized as a ‘best state document’ in 2013 by the South
Post a Comment
Read more