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.

Comments

Marchek Siblings Stay Connected With Upstate AHEC Through Academic Journey

A pair of siblings from Greer are giving back to current Upstate AHEC Health Careers students after completing the program themselves. Alex Marchek, MD is in his first year as a family medicine resident at Prisma Health Seneca. His younger sister by two years, Anna Marchek, is a second-year medical student at Edward Via College of Medicine (VCOM) Carolinas. “My mom likes to say she did good,” Anna joked. “Both of her kids are going to be doctors. She went two-for-two.” Anna (left) and Alex (right) Marchek are pictured with Nita Donald, Executive Director of Upstate AHEC. While Alex and Anna have both chosen to pursue medicine as a career, their interest in healthcare developed differently. Alex describes his discovery of health sciences as a slow realization. “It was definitely something that was on my radar really young,” said Alex. “My parents will say when I was six years old, I was talking about doing something in medicine. I had some really great science teachers in elementar...

Pee Dee AHEC Clinical Placements Help Students See Challenges – and Opportunities – of Rural Primary Care

Third-year medical student Omar Guerrero didn’t find his passion for a career in healthcare until he began shadowing health professionals as an undergraduate student. “I just knew that I really loved science and working with my hands,” said Guerrero, who double-majored in Public Health and Cellular & Molecular Biology while at the University of South Florida. It all clicked for him once he was able to observe physicians in their encounters with patients. “I saw there was a real need for Spanish-speaking physicians,” said Guerrero. “There’s a lot of disconnect between providers and Spanish-speaking patients and I thought that was definitely an area that I could make a difference in.” Now in his third year at A.T. Still University’s School of Osteopathic Medicine in Arizona, Guerrero is doing a clinical placement at Beaufort-Jasper-Hampton Comprehensive Health Services, Inc. in Richland. Guerrero was connected with Pee Dee AHEC and their Health Professions Student (HPS) program...

Maternal and Infant Health Module Sprout Available on AHEC Learning Portal

In an effort to help improve maternal and infant health outcomes in South Carolina, SC AHEC has developed a new educational module titled Sprout , which serves as a collection of information, tools and resources available in the state to support healthy mothers and babies. The module, created in partnership with the SC Office of Rural Health’s (SCORH) Family Solutions and March of Dimes of SC , can be found on the AHEC Learning Portal at www.scahec.net/learn/sprout . Sprout is an expansion from SC AHEC’s routine educational programming, as the module is targeted toward community members instead of health professionals. To make sure information is reaching all members of the public, the program simplifies or defines many terms that are used commonly in healthcare and is written in plain language that non-healthcare professionals can easily understand. “The goal is for any resident of South Carolina who is interested in supporting healthy moms and ...

South Carolina AHEC News & Updates

Search This Blog