High School Girls get a taste of Med School at Kaiser Permanente San Jose

More than 40 young San Francisco Bay Area women, all high-school students, spent their Saturday recently practicing intramedullary fixations, fracture plating, and suturing, among other orthopedic procedures, at Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center. The procedures, while very realistic, were done on mock bones, demonstration joints and some actual pigs feet bought from a local butcher shop.
“These are some of the same exercises that third-year medical students do,” said Dr. Katherine Gray, an orthopedic surgeon at Kaiser Permanente San Jose, and one of the several physicians sharing her knowledge to the high school students. “In fact, surgical residents often practice with the same materials.”
The day with the students was part of the Perry Outreach Initiative, founded nearly seven years ago as a non-profit program to inspire young women to become leaders in the field of orthopedic medicine and engineering. The interactive lecture and mock surgery session at Kaiser Permanente San Jose was one of dozens held nationwide by the Perry Initiative.
“All of the young women have to apply to get into the one-day program,” said Dr. Gray. “The girls I worked with are some of the best-and-brightest here in the Bay Area and just full of questions.”
In the real world of developing safe and effective implants for repairing broken bones, torn ligaments, and worn-out joints engineers and orthopedic surgeons work hand-in-hand. But there are few women in either field, according to the Perry group. The group says less than 12 percent of medical school orthopedic faculty and less than 7% practicing orthopedic surgeons are women. Similar statistics exist for women in engineering schools. So, to build a potential “pipeline” of women, the non-profit Perry Initiative sponsors day-long, hands-on workshops for medical schools, and high schools.
“This is a great opportunity for Kaiser Permanente’s excellent physicians to inspire young women to an important career choice,” said Irene Chavez, Senior Vice President and Area Manager of the San Jose Medical Center. “Part of Kaiser Permanente’s mission is improving the health of the neighborhood where we work, and encouraging young women to become doctors and engineers is part of that.”
In all, eight clinicians from Kaiser Permanente San Jose and Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara participated in the Perry Outreach program. The Kaiser Permanente medical staff worked with the girls on repairing bones, rotator cuffs, and scoliosis.
During day-long program, most of the girls were dressed in surgical scrubs for a bit of realism and protection. There were a few brief lectures and then it was off to “surgery.” Dr. Gray worked with some of the girls at a station where they practiced sewing up an incision on a pig’s foot as a patient stand-in. Elsewhere, the girls worked with a realistic demonstration femur and repaired a fracture. Using an electric drill, they installed a plate and screws to fix the bone break.
“The girls had amazing energy as they used the tools and decided the best strategy to repair damaged bone,” said Dr. Gray. “I was excited by their response.”
Dr. Gray, who is a team physician for the San Jose Sharks Hockey team, specializes in hand surgery. The girls peppered her with questions about becoming physicians.
“I’m glad that I could give these possible future doctors an idea of what medical school is like,” said Dr. Gray. “Most beginning med students don’t find out about it till their first day of classes.”
“I stayed late answering a lot of their questions about getting into medical school, but it was great,” she says.