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ENCORE's Medical Innovation Technology Center has partnered with Region One Education Service Center and GEAR UP to bring our human-patient simulation technology into 8 school districts throughout the Rio Grande Valley.
Students from five districts that included La Villa, La Grulla, Santa Maria, McAllen, Rio Grande and Port Isabel had a summer camp crash course on medical training at the Region One MEDITEC summer camp.
The three day camp took place in June and was held at the South Texas College Cooper Center in McAllen.
Gear Up sponsored the program designed to prepare middle school and high school students a chance to experience a look at medical school and career path.
“It was an awesome experience for them,” said Nurse Garrett, MEDITEC program manager. “Their focus was unbelievable. The kids were able to do something that they didn’t get to do in their home school setting.”
MEDITEC, a component of the Texas Valley Communities Foundation that is geared to engage student for college readiness trained the students in biology with its robot simulator and dissection project in a life-learning experience outside of the classroom.
Day One of the learning experience had a rotation of 4 different lab settings, accompanied by the Pre-med-Bio med mentors, who introduced the basics of cardio pulmonary resuscitation, along with other hands on activities that are vital and important to prevent Diabetes among our community.
Day two included a Genetic setting involving the common blood types and whether it is safe to transfuse a type of blood to another. Day three was entirely dedicated to the Biology Dissection of a Fetal Pig. Students prepared by learning about lab safety and gathered a list of all the materials that would be needed in order to perform the dissection. It was a wonderful experience for them being that it was the first time they would be performing this type of lab.
“The kids didn’t have the scalpels our mentors went down the line and dissected and actually opened them up and the students did the rest,” said Nurse Cindy Garrett.
MEDITEC was created to provide undeserved students with academic and college development experiences that will later in the future increase participation in medical careers.
Visit www.getencore.orf for more info.
MEDITEC is an initiative of the Texas Valley Communities Foundation.
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