In an empty intensive care unit room at West Penn Hospital, second-year resident Kaila Wechsler gives Miya Townsend a tour of the equipment hanging by the bedside. Miya, a 16-year-old sophomore at the Pittsburgh Science & Technology Academy in Oakland, stops her when she gets to the blood pressure cuff.
“Today I just learned how to do pulses,” said Miya.
“OK, let’s go — show me,” said Wechsler, holding out her wrist and teaching Miya the trick to go just to the side of the tendon on her wrist when Miya couldn’t find her pulse right away.
The two are members of the TRIUMPHS program — a partnership between AHN and Pittsburgh Public Schools to connect medical residents with high school students interested in careers in medicine. All participants are from minority groups underrepresented in medical careers.
Anastasios Kapetanos, the physician who runs the internal medicine residency program at AHN, came up with the idea about five years ago as a means to improve the pipeline of underrepresented minorities into medicine — in part after reading a report that fewer Black men applied to medical school in 2014 than in 1978.
“Medicine is a really tricky profession to enter,” he said. “You not only need good grades and performance, but you need access to experiences that differentiate you. Oftentimes it helps when you have a family member that’s been there to say, ‘Hey, let me tell you about what kind of courses to take, come into my office.’”
The goal of the TRIUMPHS program, he said, is to provide a metaphorical “older sibling” already on a medical journey to fill that role.
The program took several years to design, working through issues like clearances and minimum ages for hospital volunteer opportunities, and was ready to launch just as the COVID-19 pandemic started.
Because of the pandemic, the TRIUMPHS — Today’s Residents Inspiring those Underrepresented in Medicine: Pipeline for the Health Sciences — program launched virtually for the 2020-2021 school year. It now runs in-person, including activities such as job shadowing, an observation of an open heart surgery and hospital tours.
A couple of the high school students from the first class of mentees are now in college, and the original mentors are finishing up their residency programs.
Arinze Bosah, a third-year resident at AHN, heard the program was in development when he interviewed for his residency.
“I was really excited because I thought of myself when I was going through the process in high school and college — this is something that I would have loved,” he said. “When I heard about the program it was a no-brainer. I said, ‘If I end up here, sign me up.’”
Bosah, who immigrated to the United States from Nigeria with his family when he was 13, took a nontraditional path toward becoming a doctor. He went to a five-year physician assistant program after high school, and practiced as a physician assistant for four years before entering medical school.
“There was no one I knew who was a physician, no one close to it at all,” he said. “I remember being in school and having professors tell me all the time, ‘We think you are really smart, go to med school.’ I didn’t think I could do it, I had never seen anyone do it, and it took me four years to be able to convince myself to say, ‘You can do this.’”
His mentee, 18-year-old Joy Hendrix, grew up with experience in the medical field through parents who are nurses, and wants to become a doctor. When she has questions, she appreciates that she can just text Bosah, rather than embark on an uncertain internet search.
“It means a lot to see someone who is a minority like me in the place that I want to be,” she said. “It gave me a little reassurance that I can achieve this goal.”
Miya became interested in a career in medicine after seeing a career day presentation by a doctor when she was in sixth grade at St. Benedict the Moor school in the Hill District. As she got older, she learned about other medical career paths as well, such as nursing.
As she shadowed Wechsler through the TRIUMPHS program, she learned more about the day-to-day life of a doctor.
“You can see on TV, they’re always running around, always doing stuff,” she said. “I got to see in real time what they do — there’s a lot of background and paperwork that goes into it. I was a bit surprised when I saw how much paperwork they actually do.”
As for the open heart surgery she observed, “It was cool to see but it made me realize I could not do it,” she said. “It was really long.”
In part through her experiences with the mentor program, Miya now wants to become a nurse and specialize in labor and delivery, ultimately working as a midwife. She has an internship this summer with the Midwife Center of Pittsburgh.
“She feels like my little sister,” said Wechsler, who was originally a journalism major in college and didn’t start pursuing a medical career until her junior year, when she became fascinated by an anatomy class. “I’m able to coach her through what she already wants to do, just giving her advice and connecting her with the right people.”
The program has 16 mentors now, with the most senior of them graduating from the residency program this year, said Kapetanos. He’s familiar with other mentor programs around the country, but doesn’t know of any with this exact design.
What has stood out so far about the program from the perspective of Pittsburgh SciTech is its longevity, said Edwina Kinchington, a longtime science teacher there. The school has started some other mentor-type programs with other institutions, she said, but they eventually fizzled out.
Kinchington has a Ph.D. in pharmacology and was a cancer researcher for 20 years before she began her career as an educator. But the mentors bring something she can’t.
“I can promote, I can encourage, but I’m still a white woman,” she said. “This is more meaningful for them. If we’re going to get more underserved and underrepresented students of color involved in the STEM and medical fields, we need those mentors.”
Anya Sostek: asostek@post-gazette.com
First Published: May 28, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: May 28, 2023, 4:43 p.m.
