Baylor Hospital and Uplift Education’s Medical Institute partner to expose students to careers in healthcare. NBC 5’s Wayne Carter returned to the classroom to see how students are learning about blood clots and strokes.
It's the last period before lunch for these students, but it is the first time Heather Robinson has ever taught a high school class.
She works for Johnson & Johnson, bringing the newest tools to hospitals, to help train doctors how to break up and flush out blood clots. Now she's training high schoolers.
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WATCH HERE"Stroke is where the blood in your brain is not going where it is, there's a blockage somehow," she declared at the board.
It's part of Uplift Heights Healthcare Institute, a partnership between the Dallas school, Bloomberg and Baylor Healthcare.
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SIGN UP Students from the inner city who may not have ever thought about healthcare careers, learn about medicine from day one and doctors, nurses, and folks like Heather come in and answer questions.
They get hands-on experience using the same equipment doctors train on.
"What you see in the model, it had red, like a red cloud in there, and they were showing us like a specific tool that you used," said Desaray Saldana, a student in the program.
Carter In The Classroom
Focusing on unique things school districts are doing to help children succeed.
Saldana's whole family works in healthcare, so this school was a natural fit for her, and despite thinking she had it all planned out, her goals are changing.
"I wanted to do pediatric nursing because I remember kids and stuff, but now I want to do something in the radiology field," she said.
Touching the equipment and learning how it works, was eye-opening for the students. Adeoyin Adeyemo has big plans too.
"Otolaryngology, those are your ENT doctors, so ear nose and throat," he said is his plan. While preventing strokes is a lot different, he loved watching how Robinson was able to do it.
"If suction doesn't work, they're like actual little tools you can use where it's like a long piece of metal, where you stick it in the sheath and actually manually pull the clot out," he said.
Going from training doctors to training teens was hard work for Robinson, but it made sense.
"I know, seriously, it's like, this is like a model that they can see, they can touch, and they can understand it better," said Robinson.
The teens and their teachers are all sharing, learning and connecting. It's all in an effort to help grow a future crop of healthcare workers in students who, like the clots, may need a little push to get where they belong.
