MEDICINE 101: SCRUBS camp takes young teens inside the world of health care professions

Grace Beahm
The Post and Courier

Emma Ayers looks at a central line during SCRUBS camp. Students who are interested in health care careers received hands-on instruction in the various equipment and procedures used to care for patients.

The students move through the operating room at Bon Secours St. Francis Hospital in groups of three, clad in white, zip-up "bunny suits" and blue surgical masks, hair securely tucked beneath scrub caps.

They stand a few feet from the operating table and are careful not to touch any of the sterile surfaces in the room, but that doesn't stop them from rising onto the balls of their feet to catch a better glimpse of the surgeons suturing up their patient, who had a large tumor removed from his colon.

Although this might not seem like a strange occurrence in any hospital, something is different this time around. Once these students remove their bunny suits — a one-piece garment that goes over clothes to cover everything from the toes up to the neck — masks and caps, it becomes clear that these are not medical, graduate or even college students.

In fact, everyone here is a middle school student or high school underclassman age 13-15.

Not all teenagers have the opportunity to visit an operating room with a surgery in process, but this event was among the myriad learning opportunities experienced by the 22 campers in the five-day SCRUBS camp run by Roper St. Francis Healthcare in late June.

The program's name stands for Students Can Really Use Bedside Skills, and it's tailored to young teens who are interested in medical careers. With scheduled activities such as a "skills lab" that typically is given as training for nurses; a tour of the cardiac, surgical and radiology services at Roper Hospital; and a lunch with mentors already working in medicine, the camp is designed to give students hands-on experience and an insider's peek at the field.

That's something many would-be medical professionals don't get until they're well on their way to becoming doctors, nurses or other roles in the field. The camp is an extension of the hospital system's current SCRUBS mentoring program in which older teens volunteer in the hospital throughout the year to learn about their chosen fields, says Joan Perry, director of volunteers at Roper St. Francis Healthcare and one of the camp's coordinators.

Most of the students who participated in the camp already were certain of their interest in medicine and had connections in the field, whether through family members working at hospitals or volunteering elsewhere. Fourteen-year-old Will Fagan, the only male in this SCRUBS camp and a rising freshman at James Island Charter High School, is "pretty set" on his goal to become an emergency room doctor, although his initial aspirations were for the operating room.

"I wanted to work in the OR for a while, but I changed my mind because a lot of the time, they're working on one specific thing," he says. "I like to see a bunch of different things instead of the same things every day."

Will, like many other campers, has volunteered and shadowed at hospitals. One student, Lindsay Crisman, recently reached her 200-hour milestone, having volunteered regularly since May 2006.

"I volunteer in the nursery, so we have any number of babies at any time, and I'll take the babies out to their moms, bring them back, feed them, hold them, rock them, change them, restock supplies and basically assist the doctors and nurses with anything," says Lindsay, a rising sophomore at Stratford High School.

Unlike Will, whose camp experience helped him determine that certain medical careers were not for him, SCRUBS gave Lindsay a broader view of her career horizons.

"I've always thought that I just wanted to be a nursery nurse or an ultrasound tech," she says. "My favorite part of the camp was probably when I got to go with an ultrasound technician one on one, and we actually gave someone a renal, or kidney, ultrasound, so I got to see firsthand what it really looked like."

Then, during a mentor lunch, she got yet another idea of what she might like to do, after being paired with a psychiatric nurse.

From the first day, the camp began giving students hands-on experience in the health care world, starting with a CPR training course. The next day, campers learned basic medical skills such as taking blood pressure and reading vital signs in the skills lab. By week's end, they also had seen what it's like to work on the LifeLink Mobile Transport team, how to prep a patient for surgery and how to use various pieces of equipment for rehabilitation and physical therapy.

Along with practical knowledge, such as how to put on sterile gloves without contaminating them, students received training in medical etiquette. Inside their SCRUBS binder, each student carried a small "Standards of Behavior" pamphlet that covered topics such as professionalism and attitude.

Timothy Connor, one of the LifeLink paramedics, stressed the importance of treating the patient well.

"You need to explain to the patient what's going on," he told the group. "Remember that you're responsible for them and that you need to take care of them."

The students weren't spared from the more gruesome or darker side of health care, either. They saw things, including a surgery in progress, an amputated leg and a diseased colon, but they took it in stride, reflecting on the reality of this career path.

"One day, we had a patient die in the ER, and telling the family is not something that would be easy at all," says Will. "That's definitely a hard thing to do, especially when you're the doctor who took care of that patient."

Hospital staffers observed that the campers, along with their maturity, demonstrated much more knowledge about health care than typical teenagers.

"At their age, I didn't know anything about the medical field," says Margaret Mullins, media relations manager for Roper St. Francis. "These kids know so much already."

With both the students' and the staffs' infectious enthusiasm, the SCRUBS camp was so successful this year that Perry expects it will become an annual event. Already, she has received calls from parents asking about plans for next year.

"We hope that the interest in health care is reinforced," she says, "and that they have been exposed to career options that they had not known existed."

Tina Mao is a recent graduate of the Porter-Gaud School who will attend Duke University this fall. E-mail her at tinamao89@gmail.com.

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