Tonia Berry and Bailey Quigley work at the Northeast Missouri Area Health Education Center (NEMO AHEC), which aims to develop the healthcare workforce in rural Missouri by engaging with high schoolers.
This summer they’re holding camps for 7th to 12th graders in rural hospitals in Milan and Memphis, Missouri, to show them what healthcare job opportunities exist – in their own communities.
For the month of July, we're focusing on the health of those living in Kirksville and the surrounding areas.
Tonia Berry: Being an OT (occupational therapist), I have worked in almost all of my 21 counties in the past. During that, those years, I found that majority of the healthcare workers weren't as vested in communities.
They kind of had to – especially with therapy, you went from community to community to community to cover like long-term care facilities or even hospitals, even these rural hospitals, because they just didn't have an in-house therapist, and I know sometimes doctors and nurses are even doing that, whether it's a traveling position.
And part of what we do is we have a pipeline that addressed the high schools in the counties, and part of what we do is stressing health care paths and just different options.
There's a lot of high school students that don't know what their options are. They think nursing and doctor is, like, really the only thing in health care, and there's so many pathways.
So, we do a lot of healthcare pathway education – just letting them know what is available in healthcare and then having them come to hospitals, these small, rural hospital are always willing to open up to shadowing opportunities.
So, the students can actually see and become passionate about what they want to do, and it might change or spark something new for them.
Bailey Quigley: I think a lot of the stigma behind rural healthcare is that they don't have the resources, maybe, or like, it's not as big and shiny as the urban areas.
But as we saw here in Sullivan County, they have a state-of-the-art CT machine, they have a really fancy Samsung x-ray machine that the students got to see, and it really just, it's really to help pique their interest and to let them know that there are options available in rural health care.
Because I know a lot of students, especially from the rural areas, don't want to go live in a city, and we really just want to expose them to different careers, especially careers you might not think about.
Everyone knows doctors and nurses, but there's so many other careers other than doctors and nurses – there's the sonographers, there's the radiology technicians, there's occupational therapy, physical therapy.
And healthcare is so good because it can be any education level. You can go as low as maybe a two-year degree, or you can go as high as a doctoral degree. It's really, there's really something out there for everyone that they can explore.
