Introducing Healthcare Careers to Young People

Podcast Transcript

Dr. James K. Stoller:

Hello and welcome to MedEd Thread, a Cleveland Clinic Education Institute podcast that explores the latest Innovations in medical education and amplifies the tremendous work of our educators across the enterprise.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Hello. Welcome to today's episode of MedEd Thread, an Education Institute podcast exploring Connected Career Rounds, a program at Cleveland Clinic Center for Youth and College Education intended to create awareness around health profession careers. I'm your host, Dr. Tony Tizzano, director of student and learner health here at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. Today, I'm very pleased to have Dr. Michael Nelson, medical director for the Clinic Center for Youth and College Education here to join us. Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Michael Nelson:

Thanks for having me here today.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Mike, to get started, please tell us a little bit about yourself, your educational background, what brought you to Cleveland and your role here at Cleveland Clinic.

Dr. Michael Nelson:

Sure. So I am a former English language arts teacher, high school. That was my background before I got further into the education realm and then moved into healthcare. So while I was teaching, I got really interested in education as a concept and I got my Master's in Curriculum and Instruction and I met my wife, and my wife was studying to be a doctor. She started her residency here at the Cleveland Clinic. And when she started residency, I started my PhD in Education, specifically with the focus on educational technology. So I spent five years splitting my time between Columbus and Cleveland, got that PhD and went on and taught teachers for a little bit and then we both had an opportunity to come back here to Cleveland Clinic to work. And in my case, a staff position opened in the Education Institute focusing on educational technology.

While I was here working in that role, there was this need that arose for a Center for Youth and College Education. There were a lot of youth programs throughout Cleveland Clinic, a lot of programs for college students throughout Cleveland Clinic, but we really needed some consolidation, some consistency. So we brought those programs in the Education Institute, combined them with our experts in education and we offer all sorts of different services.

So that- that's a little about me and how I ended up in this position. And, and specifically within the Center for Youth and College Education, one of the programs we inherited that existed before was Connected Career Rounds. And given my tech-savviness, that program fell to me and I love to teach it.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

I'm familiar with a lot of your work, Mike, and it's fabulous to have you. So give us some idea in the context of Connected Career Rounds, what is the mission and the vision for that program?

Dr. Michael Nelson:

Sure. So the real goal is to teach students, specifically middle school students and high school students, about healthcare careers in a way that is compatible with school classrooms and the classroom environment. So we want to teach them not just about doctors but the whole spectrum of healthcare careers and that includes all the different types of doctors, different types of nurses. But this is a totally free program on Zoom that can reach literally thousands of students live in each episode and then thousands of more students on demand in each episode. 

So we really want this to be our megaphone in the Center for Youth and College Education, where we can reach students anywhere in America, any number of students and teach them broadly about these healthcare careers. And we don't want to just talk about the careers. One of the things we really focus on in Connected Career Rounds is show about the careers. So we pick a scenario in each episode every other week and we will get an entire team of caregivers that would be focused on that scenario.

So for example, we had a session this year about vaping. We brought in a couple different types of respiratory therapists. We brought in a pediatric pulmonologist. We brought in a number of other caregivers as well and we taught what each person does in the process of caring for someone who has an issue related to vaping. And we didn't just talk, we didn't just do a PowerPoint 'cause that's very boring and that doesn't engage high school students. So what we did is we actually did some pre filming of intubating a simulation mannequin. We did some filming in a research lab just to show how cool and interesting all the stuff was.

In addition to showing all these careers, my team, we go through the incomes, the education levels, the 10-year growth expectancies and how hot these careers are at Cleveland Clinic as well. And finally, we give the caregivers a chance to explain who they are, what their personal roles are and students get to ask them questions at the end of the session. So that's a little bit about Connected Career Rounds, what it is and what it hopes to do.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Well, that's outstanding. So really you've managed to not only find something that could be professionally of interest to these students and of course, we have so many opportunities at the clinic. How do you even begin to get started? But you're also melding that with topics that are current for them that might spark some interest as well. So I think it adds meaning and I hadn't thought of that before. Good work. So I've heard you described yourself as an educational tech person. What does that mean and how do you bring those skills to bear on your role here?

Dr. Michael Nelson:

Sure. So as I mentioned, my PhD was focused on educational technology and how we help teachers use technology better. In my personal role, the way I use that knowledge and my past skills as a teacher who use technology all over the place, I bring that into this program in a lot of different ways. So I do the camera shooting, I do editing, I create animations, I create the course website. I make surveys that have a lot of logic so we can collect good reliable data and I think of ways that we can engage the students who are in many cases thousands of miles away for the program and I do that through educational technology. So for me, it was exciting with my past to be able to do this program because it fits my skill set so well.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Well, it's nice when it all comes together like that. And, and again, the work is just fabulous. You know, the hope I guess at the end of the day is to fuel the pipeline in some way. Is there any evidence? Are you tracking where these students go and, and do we... do they find their way back to the mothership?

Dr. Michael Nelson:

For Connected Career Rounds, we don't have as much student level data as our other programs and the reason for that is that these students are nested within classrooms. So we have information about what schools the students are coming from, what districts they're coming from, but we don't have their individual name from a record-keeping standpoint, but we can know through that data which schools and school districts we are reaching and engaging. And in our other programs, they can identify that they participated in Connected Career Rounds so we can see if that's where they came from. With that said, our center is still very new so we don't have much of that data yet.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

So I'm sure there's more to come around that. So with regards to topic selection, I mean there are so many careers, how do you pick and choose?

Dr. Michael Nelson:

So a lot of different things. One is we want to make sure that we have a coherent scenario, we have a good narrative that we can present to the students so it'll be engaging. We don't want to bore them. We want to make sure that they are watching, they are paying attention. We try to pick a variety of careers. So like I said, we don't just wanna have orthopedic surgeons every week because then they're only learning about that one career. So we try to get a diverse team. We try to get a diverse level of education, diverse team that has many different education levels, whether it's straight to work, associate's degrees, bachelor's, master's, MDs, all that. We try to get that and we also do consult the needs of Cleveland Clinic as well. 

We realize that the organization needs to hire certain people so we look for what the hot jobs are, what are the jobs that are really in demand and that, that serves the organization, but it also... I mean, frankly, if the kids know that this is a job that they can graduate and they can walk right in, if they know that they can get tuition assistance, tuition reimbursement for becoming a nurse, that's kind of good for everybody.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Yeah, that is for certain. And of course, we hear so often that someone goes through an educational program, they get done and they can't find work in that area. So this really helps to bring the possibilities to bear. And when we look at content and you're looking at what they're learning and trying to gauge their level of engagement and assess them in some ways, how does that occur?

Dr. Michael Nelson:

So we have pre and post session surveys, for one. We use a program, I'm not gonna say the name of it, but we use an engagement program or we pull students at the beginning and end to see A, what they learned and B, whether they found the session to be interesting and engaging. Other data that we look at is views as well. So we track the views over time to see which sessions are popular, which sessions are not popular. If there was a huge drop off after one session, we know that the previous session probably wasn't very engaging. And even if it was informative, if you have informative session that nobody watches, you're not really educating anyone, right?

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Sure.

Dr. Michael Nelson:

So you have to balance that education with...

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

The purpose.

Dr. Michael Nelson:

Yeah. 

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

So when you consider the reach, you know, we mentioned that it can be all over the country, but what various individuals, students, other educators, who, who watches this?

Dr. Michael Nelson:

Sure. So I wanna bring up first the just, the different, the reach. We had 12 states last year in the first year that the program was in CYCE. We're going to surpass that this year. We've had a lot of different... We've had California, Delaware, Colorado, like all sorts of new states. It's exciting. But the people who are tuning in, we have a lot of teachers. So career and technical education teachers find us very popular. We are getting large enrollments from career and tech classrooms. Some science teachers are tuning in. We have found that a lot of career counselors from schools are tuning in. Uh, some school administrators as well are providing logins to their teachers and things like that. And we've had a couple career centers tune in with adult learners, which we were, like I said, anybody can tune in, in theory.

And then once we get to the on-demand portion, individual students can check in and watch the sessions themselves too. We don't want individual students watching the live ones necessarily because then we would have a, you know, 800-person Zoom room, you might have student misbehavior, all sorts of things like that. You know, kids stuff.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

So it's expanding?

Dr. Michael Nelson:

For sure.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

And plans for the future in that regard, is there a way to, I mean, you track it retrospectively, but in terms of your marketing, do you look at various areas saying, "Look, there may be opportunity here, we haven't seen feedback from this area"? Or by the same token, looking at areas that might h- have students who would be underrepresented in medicine? 

Dr. Michael Nelson:

Yeah, absolutely. So we are constantly looking to improve the program, to improve our reach. We found last year that there wasn't much engagement, as much engagement as we would have liked from our CMSD community. That's the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. So we would have liked to have more. So we got boots on the ground this last year and met with career counselors, principals, assistant principals and we found that there's much more engagement this year in the program. And then regarding improving the program in other ways, we are constantly getting the word out about who we are and we are also constantly reviewing that survey data that we get from the students.

So we found last year that sometimes there was a bit too much PowerPoint for example and we needed to pre film more content. It was more engaging for the students to see me get scoped and see, you know, the inside down there. That was more cool for them than to have a speech language pathologist talk about scoping someone. So that's another way we improve things. We wanna make it as visual, engaging as possible and we pay attention to that feedback.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

So you are definitely involved, I must add, from that?

Dr. Michael Nelson:

I am a patient in many cases in these scenarios.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

What about some of the various organizations, teachers organizations, do you reach out and work with some of them to try to spread the word for what you're doing?

Dr. Michael Nelson:

Yeah, absolutely. So I reached out to the big Ohio School Counselors Association. We work with the Ohio Department of Education to put out a announcement on the ODE newsletter. I work with the Association for Career and Technical Education to put things on their website as well as to email it out. We went to that conference and did a presentation, talked about all of the CYCE programs. We are also hosting the Education Service Center of Northeast Ohio in December and have been working with them. And that is a group that works with all of the school districts basically in our area.

So we are working constantly with those groups to get the word out, to promote. And I think it's, you know, we've grown quite a bit this year. So I think it's been pretty successful.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

And this is just out the gate. So we look at the last few years and COVID and the pandemic having impact us in so many ways. What do you think the pluses and minuses, you know, since you can reach out in a virtual manner in ways now that we probably didn't do before? What's your take on all of that? 

Dr. Michael Nelson:

Well, I think the pandemic obviously was horrible in so many ways. It's really devastating. But there were some good things that came out of it. One is that not just teachers, all educators became more comfortable engaging online in things like this. So I can't imagine we would have had anywhere close to this level of engagement via a Zoom program before COVID-19. You have teachers all over the country now realize that they can tune in digitally pretty easily to most things because they just spent a year administering their class that way. 

So that's one positive that came out of it was COVID raised the awareness for educators, raised their skill level and it also made us think about how we were delivering content and about how we can bring people together. It's really nice for us to be able to get teams of caregivers together without having to get them all in the room at the same time. Like if we can have a surgeon who has, you know, an hour break, but can't necessarily trek across campus or can't come from, you know, our Hillcrest campus to main to film a show, we can still have them on the show and that's perfectly fine.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Excellent. You know, that also brings me around to the idea of it used to be able to do anything in Cleveland Clinic, to come and shadow or do this or that, you had to kinda know somebody and have an in. It seems like this sort of program might level the playing field a bit. Can you speak to that?

Dr. Michael Nelson:

Yeah. This program is free and available to anyone. I try to reach from the mountain tops and get my megaphone out to let everybody know that anybody in America can tune into this program for free, no cost, nothing. And they don't have to know anybody and they can immediately start learning about healthcare careers. And that's not just, you know, I mentioned the live sessions and the on-demand sessions. We also have a very robust website that is interactive, has all sorts of career information. It has links to Bureau of Labor Statistics' career descriptors. A lot of really cool short videos that was part of the project we worked on together actually and we have those videos housed on the website.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Fabulous. And the videos are excellent. I can't believe... Right out the gate, I thought I was impressed with each and every one of them. They really do an excellent job and there's some passion that's conveyed in those videos as well. So what frequency do these programs occur and how does someone get connected to them?

Dr. Michael Nelson:

Yeah. So late September through the end of March, we have a live session every other week and it goes from 1:00 to 2:00 PM, the middle of school day. And like I said, that doesn't always work for schools and school schedules. So they can get the on-demand sessions at any point. We typically post the on-demand sessions within a couple of days after the live session takes place and we say that they will be posted by the weekend. So that's where you can have schools tuning in live every other week. Or if that doesn't work, they can go get the on-demand one whenever they want.

The sessions can be accessed by going to the website for the Center for Youth and College Education. If you type that and it's the first hit that pops up online. If you go there and you go down to Connected Career Rounds, you will see a link to click and register your class and that's just giving us some basic information, giving us your email address so that we can include you on the emails when we announce the sessions and have you RSVP. That's how we take our attendance. On that website, you will also find the link to all of the on-demand programs as well that you can access for free.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

And if you're going to get started in the formal program that you described with that registration in September, is that a single cohort that goes through or could you come in in mid stream or not?

Dr. Michael Nelson:

You can come and go as you please to any of the sessions. I know our vaping session was very popular, but I even had an educator email me and they were like, "Hey, I was really interested in the vaping session, but I don't know if we're gonna tune into the other ones just because I don't teach a subject that lines up with that."

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Sure.

Dr. Michael Nelson:

And that- that's totally fine. You can pop in and maybe you're teaching a class, an anatomy class and you're going through the brain. Well, our neurosurgery session that's next week, that might be kind of interesting for you, but maybe you don't care as much about some of the other ones.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Okay. Well, you know, I think you're probably defining the horizon for this sort of topic. But in your mind, what lies on the horizon? What would you like to see happen and what other innovations do you see coming?

Dr. Michael Nelson:

In the future, I would like to see us improve our production quality and improve our reach. I could see this program being much bigger nationally. I could see educators across America using this to teach kids about healthcare careers and to make them aware of what's there. I would also like to get a larger pool of participants as well. You know, there are some careers that we have more difficulty recruiting than others. And some of that is the high demand careers. Those people are very busy. So we need to figure out a way to get access to those people so that we can share about their careers, and they're not so busy.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Yeah. Well, that makes a lot of sense. I wonder if there's even an opportunity internationally. I mean, Cleveland Clinic really has an international reputation. Is it possible that we might even be looking to attract individuals from outside the United States and Canada?

Dr. Michael Nelson:

Absolutely. So we actually were working on... We almost did an international session this year. It kind of fell apart the last minute for a variety of reasons, but we plan to do that in the future.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Yeah.

Dr. Michael Nelson:

We just also need to keep in mind that there will be some differences here and there, just with different healthcare systems, slightly different careers. But yes, we would definitely like to branch out into the international realm with Connected Career Rounds.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Yeah, and I think the interest is there. I was giving a talk around contraception in Hyderabad, India and the first question was about Cleveland Clinic's education programs in the Lerner College of Medicine and I was almost dumbfounded, but so it's there, that interest is there and professionals know about it and I think they'd like to see their families and students connected as well, so... 

Well, Mike, are there some other areas that I didn't touch upon or questions that I didn't pursue that you feel are important for our listeners to know?

Dr. Michael Nelson:

Not really. I would just like to emphasize that, as I've said many times, the program is completely free. Sessions are on Tuesdays at 1 o'clock and you can go onto our website and register at any time. You can access those on-demand sessions at any time. Even if you're not a teacher, counselor, or whatever, if you have a kid, you can show 'em Connected Career Rounds. They can watch the on-demand videos. Not a problem.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Having seen some of this work, I- I would like to echo, give it a shot. You will be surprised. The work is really outstanding. Well, thank you so much Mike. This has been an enlightening episode of MedEd Thread. To our listeners, thank you very much for joining and we look forward to seeing you on our next podcast. Have a wonderful day.

Dr. James K. Stoller:

This concludes this episode of MedEd Thread, a Cleveland Clinic Education Institute podcast. Be sure to subscribe to hear new episodes via iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, thanks for listening to MedEd Thread and please join us again soon.