On a recent Monday night, students dressed in teal scrubs, made their way into the Hammons Medical Building on the main Mercy campus in Springfield. As they settled in with snacks, health care workers with the labor and delivery team at Mercy used a quiz game to teach them about what they do.
Medical Explorers is offered locally at both Mercy Springfield and CoxHealth for anyone 14 to 20-years-old.
One of the students in the room was 18-year-old Isabella Benson, a senior at Republic High School. She spotted a sign for the Mercy Medical Explorers program in math class and immediately knew she wanted to apply. She’d wanted to be a doctor since she was eight and broke her arm. She’s in the first cohort since the program was halted during the pandemic. It started back up in January.
"I really, really like it. It's very flexible. You can pick and choose where and when you go shadow and get a really great experience of, like, the health care field," she said.
This fall, Benson plans to attend Drury and pursue a career as a physician. She said Medical Explorers has helped prepare her for what it will be like.
"I've learned what I don't like about health care and what I really, really appreciate. I get more of a view of like what actually goes (on) inside the hospital," she said. "I haven't, luckily, haven't been in the hospital, like, as a patient or, like, someone for a patient, but seeing kind of both sides really is an eye-opening experience."
Medical Explorers is flexible to fit in with the students’ busy lives. Students choose specific pathways. They meet as a group once a month, but the rest of the time, they choose who to shadow and how many times they do so, "a lot of that real world learning," said Mason Carter, manager of academic relations at Mercy Springfield. "We love to tie that in there to make sure they know what they want to do in the future, and it helps solidify what their choices are."
He said students who attend Medical Explorers may choose to stay in it for the next cohort or take a break and come back.
You can find out more about the program at mercy.net or coxhealth.com.
