HIGHLAND HEIGHTS, Ky. — Northern Kentucky University’s College of Health and Human Services is helping students discover jobs in the medical field besides a nurse or doctor.
The college offers tours to local high schools at the request of students interested in careers such as lab technicians, imaging technicians and nursing. Most recently, a group of Campbell County High School students joined to tour the facility.
“I think everybody here agrees that there are many students who think, ‘I want to work in healthcare,’ but they don’t really know what that is or what that means beyond a nurse or a doctor, so we bring them in here to show them so many other options,” Director of the School of Allied Health, Trina Cossin said. “It’s wonderful if they want to decide on nursing or if they want to go a pre-med route, but our goal here is to show them all the options at NKU.”
The tours include NKU’s Center for Simulation Education, which is within the College of Health and Human Services.
The simulation center is a space where students can practice real-life healthcare situations. The center has eight inpatient simulation rooms, including an operating room and a multi-bed critical care room. It also has a simulated home health environment and eight outpatient examination rooms.
Cossin said there is really nothing else in the area like NKU’s simulation lab.
Aside from nursing, which is one of the biggest programs, there is allied health, which includes radiologic science, respiratory care, radiation therapy, a non-clinical program (doesn’t directly deal with patients), health administration, and cardiovascular perfusion (the person who runs the heart and lung pump during open heart surgeries). Outside of allied health, the college also has kinesiology, athletic training, occupational therapy, and more.
“We can’t even accommodate all the tour requests that we get,” Cossin said. “It’s becoming a pretty popular tour destination because so many of the high schools have students interested in a health career.”
One Campbell County High School student who attended the tour was senior Jazlynn Miller.
Miller said she is interested in studying forensic science but has learned that it helps to know a little bit of everything in the medical field for that job. Miller also pulled interest from a personal medical experience. She had a serious knee injury a few years ago that has led to her becoming interested in physical therapy.
“I ended up having to get a second surgery to get the hardware removed because of the way it was rubbing on one of my tendons, really, really hurt,” Miller said. “My physical therapist kind of struggled trying to advocate for what I was trying to tell her, and some of the other doctors did too. I’m kind of interested in going into physical therapy because of that.”
Miller told LINK nky that when she thought of healthcare, nurses and doctors came to mind, but she hadn’t done much research on what else was out there. That’s where the tour of the College of Health and Human Services became helpful.
“I’m really enjoying the fact that I’m hearing a little bit about everything like you could do physical therapy, or you could do radiology, and how it helps everyone else [in the hospital],” she said.
NKU Nursing student Owen Setters served as an ambassador for the College of Health and Human Services during the tour. The goal was to show the students what life could be like in an NKU program.
“Right now, we’re helping out with the simulation, showing them how the mannequins work, stuff that we offer to show them the human body and how that works, just like a different perspective to offer through Sims [simulations],” Setter said. “One of the main things is we’re just trying to show them something that interests them.”
Setters said he and the other ambassadors are showing students the things they don’t get to see in a classroom or on a regular field trip through the college.
This story originally appeared on our partner's website LINK nky.
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