Mercy White Coat Seminar

November 27, 2017

Mercy White Coat Seminar

Last week we had our culminating field trip for our third annual Mercy White Coat Seminar. Every year this gets better and better! This year, students toured pharmacy, the lab, rehab, and surgery! In class we were also visited by dental and emergency medicine!

This all started three years ago as a brainchild for how to expand on the extra M in STEAMM (that stands for Medicine, and SURPRISE! is my favorite letter;) Sitting at the table with then Mission and Community Outreach Coordinator Tracia Wellman, we were first discussing the plans for another Mercy program called Well Women, when we diverged into talks about other ideas on how to bridge the gap between STEM and Mercy Medical, and well, the rest is history as we say! The Mercy White Coat Seminar just wrapped up its third and best year, with no signs of slowing down any time soon!

Today, new Mission and Community Outreach Coordinator Tenicia James continues to expand upon the program, making each year special!

Mercy White Coat Seminar is a 6 week program with visitors from Mercy Medical Center departments coming in every Friday to talk to and teach a select group of 7th and 8th grade STEAMM Students. The counselor (and my bestie!) and I have a rigorous selection process that considers career assessment, student interest survey, behavior and academic data. With some tough decisions, we manage to whittle the student applicants down to 20 students per year.

At the end of the 6th week, student take a field trip to Mercy Medical Center where they tour the facility and receive their white coats! They absolutely adore these coats, as they become a symbol of pride and accomplishment! The kids waiting back at school love to see their peers all dressed in their white coats, too, and hear the stories of their adventures!

This year was extra special because not only did we get to see the surgical robot, but we got to dress up and tour behind the scenes in the surgery department! How awesome! Kids couldn't decide on which they like wearing more, their white coats or their surgery scrubs! Tough decisions ;-) The adults had fun too! Paging Dr. Simmons! Paging Dr. Wheeler! Paging Dr. Kiriakou! You're needed in surgery, stat!

Time to scrub in, Dr. Burgan! Your patient is prepped and waiting!

The program truly is the embodiment of STEM as it introduces students to not only traditional medical professions, but also provides opportunities to see how and where robotics and other careers intersect with the medical field. In the pictures below, students are standing inside the round pharmacy robot that is responsible for filling thousands of prescriptions a day! They also see the special packaging required for the medicines inside. What type of engineer designs those packages? So much engineering in this one picture!

The kids love to debate which department is the best ;-) From pharmacy, lab, dental, rehabilitation, emergency medicine, and surgery, that sure is a tough choice! I think I like them all! We had a nice discussion in lab this year. In class,we'd just finished a unit on foodborne illnesses, and, wouldn't you know, in lab they were working on cultures from the ER to test for foodborne illnesses! Doesn't get more real-world and relevant than this!