Program Gives Teens Medical Experience

As a 16-year-old Van Nuys High School student, Dimitry Bar has witnessed more surgical procedures--ranging from hysterectomies to complicated births--than most people would care to in a lifetime.

What really makes him squeamish, though, has nothing to do with scalpels or blood.

“The scariest thing I’ve seen here is that people get laid off in the health-care industry because of things like HMOs,” he said.

Dimitry, of Hollywood, is one of 240 Van Nuys students a year getting a rare look at the inner workings of Northridge Hospital Medical Center through the school’s Medical Magnet program.

One of just two such full-fledged programs in the Los Angeles Unified School District, it educates students in all aspects of medicine and provides hands-on training about once a week in areas ranging from surgery to management.

On Thursday, L.A. school board member Julie Korenstein presented program organizers with a special resolution from the board honoring the magnet, which began at Valley Presbyterian Hospital in 1992 and switched to Northridge in 1995.

“I was tremendously impressed that high school students were doing all of this,” Korenstein said. “I talked to some kids who had been there for the delivery of twins. I asked them, ‘Doesn’t it make you nervous?’ and they said, ‘No, it doesn’t bother me at all.’ And these are 15- and 16-year-olds!”

There are limits, of course, to what the students do. In surgery, for example, they just observe. Patients are informed of the students’ presence, and only certain doctors and nurses tutor them.

No matter what career path they choose, students seem to value the hospital experience--the participants were chosen from a field of nearly 800 applicants.

“Being here has given me a better idea of what the world of medicine offers,” said junior Sherry Saadat of Woodland Hills.

“It puts them in the world of work,” said Van Nuys’ Principal Russ Thompson. “They connect that to school and it makes everything seem more real.”