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By: Katie Farry
As many of you may or may not know, I am only in school for 6th, 7th, and 8th period. That is not because I got lucky and don’t have classes in the morning. It’s because I am a part of the New Visions Medical program.
This program is not for the faint of heart or any junior who is planning on having an easy senior year. In this program, I drive myself to and from Saratoga everyday and surround myself with the workings of the medical field. During the month of September I had classes at Wesley Nursing Home every day, but ever since the day after Columbus Day, I have been going on clinical rotations. I still have to go to classes at Wesley on Mondays and Fridays, but for the rest of the week I am by myself, shadowing some members of the medical profession.
On class days, I learn about the workings of the human body in anatomy and physiology. Mrs. Hart, the New Visions instructor, has split that part of the course up into the different types of systems and parts of the body. I learn about the names of medical diseases and functions of body parts in medical terminology. I will be receiving college credits for medical terminology through ACC at the end of the school year. I also receive the required high school credits for English, government, and economics, but they are heavily influenced by medical information. There is not a single assignment that I do that does not have some medical content. I recently had to present a Power Point on a controversial subject in medicine and I choose to research surrogacy pregnancy. As Mrs. Hart said the very first time I met her, “You will not enjoy this program unless you have a strong interest in the medicine.”
Now, this is the part that a lot of my classmates ask me about: the clinical rotations. Basically what happens with my clinical rotations is that I get to watch procedures that happen on a daily basis at Saratoga Hospital and many area physicians’ offices. For the past three weeks I have had clinical rotations in the hospital on two nursing units and the Diagnostic Center. On the nursing units, I have observed everything from a simple IV insertion to the rapid response when a patient got an irregular heart beat. In the Diagnostic Center, I was able to observe multiple labs and procedures during my time there. I witnessed two types of stress tests, one that required radioactive contrast and one that just had the patient hooked up to an EKG machine. Clinical rotations are very fascinating opportunities that most people don’t get to witness until they are well into medical school. Plus, you get to wear a lab coat.
The other perk to being in New Visions is that you get college exposure and you get to work one on one with residents living at Wesley Nursing Home. Mrs. Hart actually has an assignment where you write your college essay, and I don’t have to worry about writing it on top of other homework. She also allows for medical related colleges to come to the classroom to talk about their program. This brings the college to you instead of you going to them and gives you valuable information that you might not have found out at an open house or web page.
Working with the residents at Wesley is one of my favorite things that we do. My class plays bingo and does some art projects with the residents, so that they can have social interaction with people other than the nurses. In only the first few weeks of the New Visions program, I was learning the proper technique of pushing a wheelchair into an elevator and maneuvering over bumpy, rocky pathways. Each day that my class works with residents is a captivating day because I am paired with a new person and get to know all about their life before they came to the nursing home.
I extremely love the New Visions Medical program. It’s really helping me see medical career options I had never thought of. It has also shown me that the medical field is absolutely what I want to go into. As I said before this program is not for the people who are squeamish around blood and other bodily fluids. It is also not for people who want to have an easy, social senior year. This program will challenge you, but anything you may give up is worth it when you consider how much you are being exposed to.
Mrs. Hart has not planned when she is going to come visit our school to talk to potential juniors who are interested in this program. However, if there are juniors or even sophomores or freshmen who want to learn more about this program, then please talk to Ms. Morck or myself. If you have any desire to go into a medical profession you should at least consider looking into participating in the New Visions Medical program for your senior year.