Nurturing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics ...

Journal of Hospital Librarianship

ISSN: 1532-3269 (Print) 1532-3277 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/whos20

Nurturing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Seeds to Med-Start Trees: Fundamentals of Health Care Education Kathleen Carlson To cite this article: Kathleen Carlson (2015) Nurturing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Seeds to Med-Start Trees: Fundamentals of Health Care Education, Journal of Hospital Librarianship, 15:2, 235-240, DOI: 10.1080/15323269.2015.1014761 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15323269.2015.1014761

Published online: 05 May 2015.

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Date: 02 May 2016, At: 11:38

Journal of Hospital Librarianship, 15:235–240, 2015 Published with license by Taylor & Francis ISSN: 1532-3269 print/1532-3277 online DOI: 10.1080/15323269.2015.1014761

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Nurturing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Seeds to Med-Start Trees: Fundamentals of Health Care Education KATHLEEN CARLSON Arizona Health Sciences Library Phoenix, University of Arizona College of Medicine Phoenix, Phoenix, Arizona, USA

INTRODUCTION The Med-Start program at the University of Arizona College of Medicine Phoenix (UACoM-P) is designed to identify high school students who are interested in medicine and the allied health professions and to help prepare them for their college and postgraduate course work (1). Several similar programs are described in the medical literature (2–4). The objectives of the Health Professions Partnership Initiative at the Medical College of Georgia created in 1996 were a. To create a pipeline of well-qualified high school students interested in health care careers b. To increase the number of well-qualified applicants to medical and other health professions schools c. To increase the number of underrepresented minority students at the Medical College of Georgia (5). The high school component of this initiative was the Health Science Learning Academy (HSLA). Since its creation in the 1996–1997 academic year, 203 students have participated in the HSLA and all 38 (from the original two Augusta, Georgia, high schools) who completed the 4-year program © Kathleen Carlson Comments and suggestions should be sent to the Column Editor: Michael Heyd (E-mail: [email protected]). 235

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have enrolled in college. Another program was at the University of South Alabama Biomedical Library. The summer enrichment program was designed to encourage minority students to enter health care professions by enhancing their preparation. The curriculum developed by the librarians focused on developing information searching skills (6).


SESSION ONE The 2014 Med-Start session began on Tuesday, May 29. Twenty-three students in the Scientific Research One class were asked to research a topic of their choice and find three peer-reviewed articles on their topic. The Med-Start program coordinator provided a list of 50 topics. Prior to the course work, the librarian vetted the list to ensure that at least three comprehensible, peer-reviewed articles on each topic were available to the students. Three topics were removed from the list because the librarian’s presearch determined that there were not three acceptable articles for them: almonds and cardiovascular disease, cacao and cognition disorders, and sunlight and skeletal health. After selecting their topics, students were provided instruction by the librarian on how to search with subject headings and keywords in the CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature) database. Topics included stress, depression, DNA, music therapy, and sleep disorders. Students were given user IDs and passwords to access the database to find articles on their subject in scholarly journals. At the conclusion of the 2-week session, students created a poster about their research and explained their findings in a poster session for family, friends, and college staff. Med-Start students who attended a high school with a school librarian tended to be better prepared for doing research than students without previous librarian access or contact. Exposure to library instruction at an early age can carry over to the community college, college, and medical school students’ ability to use the correct search terms, including controlled vocabulary and keywords. The visibility of a librarian in a research session increases the possibility of a student asking for assistance and gives the profession credibility.

SESSION TWO The second 2-week session was titled Arizona’s Health Care Needs II. A new group of 20 junior and senior high school students were asked to select one of Arizona’s 15 counties for investigation: Apache, Cochise, Coconino, Gila, Graham, Greenlee, La Paz, Maricopa, Mohave, Navajo, Pima, Pinal, Santa Cruz, Yavapai, and Yuma. The students researched demographic


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information on their selected counties. Students who worked alone were asked to select at least two health issues in their county, and teams selected four health issues. The students documented the health issues using the Arizona Department of Health Services Web site (AZDHS) (7). This Web site is the best source of state-specific health information, organized by topic and often broken out by county. The students were to choose appropriate keywords and construct their searches in the AZDHS Web site and analyze their results. Health topics included access to health care, chronic conditions, health behaviors, infectious and sexually transmitted diseases, mental health, maternal and child health, and nutrition. The students were required to find the following information on the issues that they selected: population size, average income per household, represented ethnicities or race, gender, age, home ownership, employment status, disabilities, and mobility. Each team presented a poster explaining the topic researched. Teams assigned to the larger Arizona counties were able to find a wealth of information on the AZDHS Web site. Teams that worked on the smaller counties such as Graham, La Paz, and Santa Cruz found it difficult to find basic information on infant mortality and sensitive information on teenage pregnancies.

SESSION THREE The final 2-week session, Health Care Team III, included 36 ninth and tenth grade students. They selected a health care profession of their choice to gather information and analyze the occupation, including education requirements, role and duties of the profession, limitations, average income, and number of practitioners in the United States. The students used a minimum of three research sources. Students received instruction in the use of the Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH) (8) and University of Arizona electronic resources during the class and learned search techniques in Associations Unlimited (9) and a discovery tool called Summon Search. In the OOH, students could search by occupation groups, filter using an occupation finder, or browse an A to Z index that contains a complete list of more than 300 occupations that cover 84% of the jobs in the United States. Associations Unlimited, which is a proprietary resource accessed through the UA Libraries proxy server, is good at finding regional associations and professional societies not found in the OOH. Summon Search, which was implemented during the summer of 2014, enables searching of all UA Libraries content through a single interface. For their final project, the students produced a poster displaying their health care professions research, showing educational attainment criteria, members in the profession, and salaries.

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RESULTS All 79 students enrolled in the Med-Start Program completed their final projects. They presented their findings during a poster session the final day of their 2-week session. The students said they learned about health issues in their selected Arizona counties, the years of education required for medical and allied health professions, and how to apply their searching skills to find relevant information on their research topics by doing a review of the medical literature. An informal review of the posters and discussion with the students found that the library instruction session was useful in gathering quality information for the final project. Without the library component the students most likely would have sought authoritative information through Google or Wikipedia instead of using research databases such as CINAHL or MEDLINE. The students had never created a conference style poster presentation. One of the two librarians brought in a poster from a national conference, so the students had something to use as a base reference. The next group of high school students will have the Med-Start poster “Nurturing STEM seeds to Med-Start trees: Fundamentals of health care education,” which was created for the 2014 Quintessential: Convergence and Collaboration Conference in Denver, Colorado. Hospital librarians can get involved with a program like Med-Start, especially if they are a teaching hospital. Early exposure to library skills and medical librarians may help hospital librarians work more effectively with medical students, residents, and new physicians farther down their career path.

LESSONS LEARNED Each 2-week session presented its own questions. There were lessons learned that are being considered for changes for next year’s Med-Start Program. With proper training by a librarian, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) high school students can effectively use PubMed for free research in MEDLINE and additional proprietary databases. Even though demographic data are readily available at the Arizona Department of Health Services Web site, sometimes it is suppressed in low population counties due to privacy concerns. The students learned that even researchers have to make do with the limitations of statistics reported by governmental departments. Another Web site available for state, county, and city data is the United States Census Bureau (10) and this is freely available to the student. Data for major job classifications are readily available at the US Bureau of Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook Web site for the general category of physician and surgeons, but medical specialties are sometimes

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hard to find. Web sites of professional societies such as the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (11), the American Physical Therapy Association (12), and the American Academy of Physician Assistants (13) may also have to be searched. Instruction in electronic databases and reliable Web sites help high school students in researching health topics. These search techniques and skills can be transferred to other disciplines such as history, social sciences, and politics. Assessing and surveying the students to find out whether they liked the library skills course and if it assisted them in finding information for their posters will help guide future program enhancements.


CONCLUSIONS The UACoM-P Office of Admissions and Recruitment will track the 79 MedStart students to see how many apply to the College of Medicine Phoenix program in the years to come. The university will find out if the Med-Start program encourages high school students to continue a path to medicine and allied health professions in Arizona. At least two Arizona high school students who have come through the Med-Start program have continued their career in medicine. Expanding the program to include ninth graders for the first time has helped in marketing the program to younger students throughout the state. For the past 3 years, the UACoM-P librarians have enjoyed the challenges and rewards of instructing each new cohort of students. Unfortunately, the Med-Start program is being replaced for 2015 by a new program, Summer Scrubs. The program will be 1 week instead of 2, and because of the shorter duration, there will be no research component and therefore no need for library skills.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The author thanks Lexi Christopher, Program Coordinator, Office of Admissions and Recruitment, University of Arizona College of Medicine Phoenix, Phoenix, Arizona ([email protected]), for her help with this column.

REFERENCES 1. Bravo A. (2014). UA College of Medicine-Phoenix Med-Start Program begins: high schoolers get an early taste of health professions. http://phoenixmed. arizona.edu/news/ua-college-medicine-phoenix-med-start-program-begins (12 Jan 2015).


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2. Maillet JO, D’Anna S. Health science careers: tech prep consortium for New Jersey. J Allied Health. 2001;30(3):180–182. 3. McKendall SB, Kasten K, Hanks S, Chester A. The health sciences and technology academy: an educational pipeline to address health care disparities in West Virginia. Acad Med. 2014;89(1):37–42. 4. Thomson WA, Denk JP, Miller LM, Ochoa-Shargey B, Jibaja-Rusth M. Results of a summer academy to increase minority student access to allied health and other health professions. J Allied Health. 1992;21(2):79–93. 5. Fincher RM, Sykes-Brown W, Allen-Noble R. Health sciences learning academy: a successful “pipeline” educational program for high school students. Acad Med. 2002;77(7):737–738. 6. Rossini B, Burnham J, Wright A. The librarian’s role in an enrichment program for high school students interested in the health professions. Med Ref Serv Q. 2013;32(1):73–83. 7. Arizona Department of Health Services. Health and wellness for all Arizonans. http://www.azdhs.gov/ (12 Jan 2015). 8. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2014). Occupational Outlook Handbook. http:// www.bls.gov/ooh/ (12 Jan 2015). 9. Gale Centage Learning. (2008). Associations Unlimited. www.gale.cengage.com/ pdf/navguide/assun_nvg.pdf (12 Jan 2015). 10. United States Census Bureau. (2015). http://www.census.gov/# (13 Jan 2015). 11. Society of Thoracic Surgeons. (2014). http://www.sts.org/patient-information/ what-thoracic-surgeon (13 Jan 2015). 12. American Physical Therapists Association (APTA). (2015). http://www.apta.org/ AboutPTs/ (13 Jan 2015). 13. American Academy of Physician Assistants (AAPA). (N.D.). http://www.aapa. org/landingquestion.aspx?id=290 (13 Jan 2015).