Healthcare professional students from around BC are bringing the world of health care to high schools in the Cariboo.
The Healthcare Travelling Roadshow made a stop in 100 Mile House yesterday at Peter Skene Ogden Secondary.
Today (May 28) they will roll into Lake City Secondary in Williams Lake and tomorrow (May 29) they’ll pay a visit to Correlieu Secondary in Quesnel.
The Roadshow was founded in 2010 by Dr. Sean Maurice assistant Dean with the UBC Northern Medical Program.
“It’s meant to help with rural health workforce because we know that we don’t have enough healthcare providers in in rural communities and we know rural youth face greater barriers into getting into healthcare careers but if they do they are more likely to return to their home community or another small community,” Dr. Maurice said.
The Healthcare Travelling Roadshow highlights various health careers from the perspectives of students training in those professions.
“A group of 12 different healthcare students that are in various stages of their different training programs are representing 10 different healthcare careers. They’re talking to high school students about what they like about their career and they’re doing hands-on interactive demonstrations. Students get to see something fun, see some of the specific equipment that they may not otherwise see, ask questions and just learn about the diversity of careers that are in healthcare.”
Dr. Maurice noted it’s not just Doctors and Nurses, there’s also a lot of other people that help to keep the healthcare system running so we try to give the students a taste of that.
The Roadshow has grown to include regional trips each year in Northern and Interior BC and since its inception has visited over 16,500 youth in 102 community visits throughout northern and rural BC.
“Our first trip to the Cariboo, 100 Mile House, Williams Lake, and Quesnel was in 2017. We were here again in 2023 so this is our third visit to these communities. We’d like to be in every community every year but we don’t have that capacity yet so we do a group of three to five communities and it’s about every 3 to 5 years that we return to those communities but we have been to everywhere in the north,” Dr. Maurice said.
He added that students who have come into medicine and other programs told him that it was the Healthcare Travelling Roadshow that got them thinking about going into that career.
The Roadshow highlights various health careers from health care assistant to speech language pathology, respiratory therapy to biomedical engineering.
Something going on in the Cariboo you think people should know about?
Send us a news tip by emailing cariboonews@vistaradio.ca.
