LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – A University of Nevada, Reno study in 2023 found 70% of Nevadans live in areas dealing with healthcare shortages.
There is a group in the Valley called Las Vegas Heals that want to fix the shortages and they say the answer starts at valley high schools.
These young high school students may be your doctor or nurse in approximately the next 10 years or so.
They are Green Valley High School students and members of the school’s medical society.
Thirty students at this one school that spend afternoons taking field trips to local hospitals, meeting face to face with healthcare professionals including College of Southern Nevada’s respiratory lab.
It was Green Valley High School senior Brianna Shaw’s idea to put together a group of like-minded students to get this kind of real-world exposure.
“So now I’m very excited with medicine. I’m very ignited because, as you see, I get to work places like this, I get to meet people, I get to see what it’s like, talk to doctors. So this whole experience has really ignited me to be passionate about the medicine field,” said Shaw.
Green valley, Cheyenne and Rancho High Schools all have medical societies. They are student led, but industry supported.
And these two men…Diego Trujillo and Kolton Villa are their biggest advocates.
They are the ceo and chairman, respectively of Las Vegas Heals. It’s a coalition of medical professionals with the goal of improving access to healthcare. For them, that means growing the next generation healthcare professionals and keeping them in Nevada.
“The medical shortages are pretty widespread throughout the country. Here in Nevada, they’re kind of exacerbated.” Trujillo continues, “We see that played out many times in the groups that we have where nurses are just complaining about being burnt out. A lot of the staff after COVID, they’re really just a lot of retirement coming up, and so the pipeline in is crucial to us making sure that we can serve the community as we grow.”
Just to reach the national average Nevada would need 255 more doctors, 626 nurse practitioners, and over 3,000 registered nurses, including more than 13-thousand hospital workers and residential care center nurses.
Villa and Trujillo believe showing the students a way forward into medicine will help.
Villa states, “Showing them what that path looks like, showing them what the opportunities are available, what the education looks like. You know, who’s going to be able to pay for your education and train you, and what the job opportunities look like. Because it can be very, very cloudy, and we’re just trying to connect the dots to make it easier for them, so we can really cultivate an organic workforce pipeline here.”
Villa and Trujillo took on this mission after witnessing the struggles of older family members trying to get medical care. In Villa’s case, both his grandmothers had Alzheimer’s disease.
FOX5: Was it a challenge to even get her into doctors?
“It absolutely was, yeah, there was a big challenge. You know, there’s, there’s such a, obviously, shortage of physicians here, here in Las Vegas. And really, just the continuum of care from one doctor to another is obviously really, really difficult,” said Villa.
Las Vegas Heals organizing these field trips and connecting students with mentors including college students, professors, doctors, and nurses.
They say it doesn’t take long for the high school students to jump in.
Villa responded, “They start to ask questions and engage with the students and the staff that’s here, we really saw them open up and like that, their curiosity start to get sparked. And you know, they wanted touch and feel and interact with everything. And it was just a really great experience to see kind of unfold.”
Trujillo exclaimed, “they’re motivated, because they begin to see themselves in those roles, and that’s very important for us, is that they don’t think that someone somewhere went to medical school and then came here, but that students could have gone through the CCSD system, could have gone to school here in Las Vegas and can now serve the community in Las Vegas as a physician or another type of provider.”
The pipeline of high school students is especially helpful to CSN. The school has a one-of-a-kind cardio-respiratory program complete with lifelike mannequins called sim-men, which mimic respiratory problems in humans.
No other school in the country has this but the challenge is to fill the classroom every year.
Trujillo remarked, “In the next three to five years, there will be a massive shortage of respiratory therapists in particular throughout the country. So, feeding people into the pipeline right now, having them start school today is the perfect timing to start this new career.”
And Brianna has her healthcare journey mapped out. It ends in Nevada. She hopes other students will follow her.
FOX5: Tell me where you see yourself in 10 years?
Brianna noted, “In 10 years, I’m pretty sure I will be finishing my residency, so I assume that that will be a very big moment in life for me, knowing that I have made it and I am in my specialty. So, I think that’ll be a really exciting.”
Villa declared, “I want these kids to know you don’t have to have a 4.0 you know, if you don’t know what you want to do, but you want to be in healthcare, let me help you find your place, and kind of guide you along.”
Las Vegas Heals currently works with 39 students between four CCSD high schools, with many other schools (including charter school) working on launching as well.
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