After a student took the Health and Medical 101 class with Jerry Hinn last year, she joined the nursing program at Northern Virginia Community College.
When Hinn asked her how the adjustment was, she described her experience easily understanding medical terms that were used. She became a certified nurse aide and planned to take additional steps to become a nurse practitioner.
The course, run through Fairfax County Public Schools’ Adult and Community Education, aims to help aspiring medical professions get a head start.
Hinn, program specialist for the health and medical department with ACE, said the next cohort is scheduled to start this fall. It’s expected to launch in August and include 15 three-hour sessions on Saturdays, so students who have many extracurriculars don’t feel overwhelmed.
“It’s a kind of a crash course in anatomy and medical terminology, and it’s also a skill builder,” Hinn said, “with the idea that people in the medical field who are tripping over their words don’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence in the patients that they’re treating.”
The class is open to high school students and recent graduates, and Hinn said it costs $300 — plus the cost of a textbook that students keep. It’s designed to give students an edge in the county’s career and technical academies or in college programs.
“This is a skill builder class that will get people to be more successful when there’s credits and transcripts on the line,” Hinn said.
In addition to giving students background on jargon, Hinn said the class involves several outside guest speakers to offer perspective on different career paths. Participants in last summer’s course were open-minded and were unsure the exact role they wanted to pursue.
Beyond vocabulary and anatomy, Hinn said the class offers students a path to gaining the “confidence to practice on this. I would hate to sit in front of a doctor or nurse and them kind of fumbling around with Wikipedia, and you could hear from the lilt in their voice that they’re not really understanding how to communicate what they’re seeing or what they’re reading.”
The health care field includes many entry-level career possibilities, and Hinn said students who take the course “feel ready to apply and that there’s jobs awaiting for them.”
More information on the program is available online.
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