The United States is facing a health care worker shortage and the NAACP and Providence brought in Rogers High School students to educate them on how they can answer this necessary call.
The NAACP partnered with Sacred Heart Hospital and Providence to bring the annual Rogers High School Health Care Career Day to a new level in 2024.
The James W. Mounsey Clinical Simulation Lab held in February, gave students like Marissa Angel hope for a bright and successful future in the medical field. A junior at Rogers, Angel has wanted to be in the medical field for a long time. She lost her mom to cardiac problems and was moved to medicine to help others like her mom. Taking classes like chemistry, physics, and soon AP Biology, Angel has always had an eagerness to learn about the field so she may one day help save lives.
“When I was super, super young, like second grade, I was researching like medical positions, and I wanted to be a heart surgeon for the longest time,” Angel said. “And then I went to cardiologists, but then I was like, I don’t know if I could do surgery. So then I went to a nurse practitioner in cardiology,” she said.
She shared that she rarely saw a black nurse or doctor helping her mom.
“I think that now that we are getting more into the 21st century, and we are advancing more, I really like the fact that there are more Black nurses, Black doctors, Black providers, because it makes me personally feel welcomed and understood,” Angel said.
Working with Angel that day was someone who shares the same sentiment as her, the Chief Nursing Officer at Sacred Heart, Neil Apeles.
Apeles has been working at Sacred Heart for eight years and at Providence for nearly 15. Originally from Los Angeles, he shared that Spokane showed him a diverse culture shock. “I especially saw it in the workforce, which poses a set of challenges, you know, when you’re caring for our communities of color. For me, personally, I needed to try to find my community here, which was very difficult,” Apeles shared.
Both Angel and Apeles have the same goal, bring diversity into our healthcare field not just in Spokane, but the United States as a whole. Diversifying the nursing program at Providence and Sacred Heart is just one way that the hospital is helping aid in diversifying our health care system. They agreed that having representation in doctor’s offices and hospitals isn’t negotiable. Angel added that many times Black or Brown patients often feel unheard and experience poorer outcomes.
“I just feel like they do name us as overdramatic, and sometimes they don’t take our problems as serious. So like, if I say I have personal experience, I had a herniated disk,” she said.
From her experience of being dismissed and Black in the health care system, she is encouraging young people to not give up.
“I kept going back to the ER and I kept saying, I have this problem, I have this problem. I’m not just gonna let it be dismissed. Like, I can’t even stand up. I can’t take a shower with more than two minutes. I can’t do anything. So I just kept, keep going back, keep voicing your concerns your problems, because eventually someone will hear you,” she said.
All of her future hard work and dedication to medicine, coupled with her focus on people, is exactly what will help Angel excel in this field, according to Apeles.
“I started my career very early in my high school program, very similar to this, you know, getting exposure to what types of options and health care professions are available, and then start using that as a kind of a launching pad,” he shared.
“It’s not just medicine, it’s not just nursing, and then also making sure that all our kids know that, you know, we need you, we need you in health care, and we need a diverse health care workforce. Okay. And we need different backgrounds and cultures, because it just offers to teach each other. And I think we’ve got a lot of work to do in our community.”