(Image Credit: CFJC News)

By Sydney Chisholm

health sciences academy

New Health Sciences Academy giving high school students a leg up to a pursuit in medicine

Oct 9, 2024 | 8:30 PM

KAMLOOPS – School District 73’s Health Sciences Academy is the first of its kind for the Kamloops-Thompson area.

The new program gives Grade 11 and 12 students from high schools throughout Kamloops an introduction to the world of health care.

“When I heard about this program, I was really excited and I just jumped on the list and signed up for it because I thought it was a great opportunity to get involved in the medical world,” said Joel Williams, a Grade 12 Norkam student in the academy.

All 26 of the students have aspirations to become doctors, nurses or other healthcare professionals – but that alone isn’t enough to succeed in the program.

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These students spend five days a week learning about different aspects of medicine.

In Tuesday’s class, students learned how to administer an intravenous line and take blood from a patient.

“It’s a lot of work, but it’s very fun,” said Grade 12 student, Matthew Ambler. “I would not have expected to do all this – like the IVs that we did today, I would not expect that to do it in the regular high school class.”

Through a work-study program with Royal Inland Hospital and two long-term care homes in Kamloops, students will have a better idea of what they want to specialize in before they apply for post-secondary.

“Even in our short time, exploring the hospitals and talking to different healthcare professionals, I’ve become way more interested in nursing than I originally was,” said Alexa Hess, a Grade 12 student from Valleyview Secondary. “Applications for university are open, so I think that’s what I’m going to apply for.”

Marie Busch, the health science teacher, says by the time students get to the post secondary level, they will be leaps and bounds ahead of others in their classes.

“We’ve talked with TRU and the lab people at TRU, to see what the experience of first-year students would be like and trying to give the kids here at least that hands-on experience,” said Busch, “so when they get to a lab in first-year university, they have that little bit of a leg up on all the other kids who [have never seen anything like this]… They have that experience and they can kind of be a little bit of a leader in their own area.”