Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine campuses in Cleveland and Dublin have seen growth in non-profit programs that focus on bringing Ohio high school students into the medical field.
The Aspiring Doctors Pre-college Pipeline Program is a three-year longitudinal high school pipeline program for underrepresented minorities in Cleveland. The OU+REACH (Re-imagining Educational Approaches to Careers in Healthcare) Discovery Series at the Dublin campus is a three-day summer camp program that also offers academic enrichment activities throughout the year to high-school students.
“(OU+REACH) is in conjunction with the College of Health Sciences and Professions in Dublin and the Aspiring Doctors Pre-college Pipeline Program, which is a year-long program that will soon be starting its second full year at the Heritage College, Cleveland,” Linda Knopp, HCOM's director of communications, said.
At both HCOM campuses, the programs teach participants about healthcare careers through academic enrichment, hands-on clinical activities, lectures and clinical judgement simulations.
The Cleveland camp serves 200 students per year and recently received a grant for more than $83,000 from the state of Ohio. The Community Connectors grant is the largest funding award the program has received and the largest grant for the Cleveland campus since it opened in 2015, said Terra Ndubuizu, senior director of administration at the Heritage College, Cleveland and co-developer of the Aspiring Doctors program.
The OU+REACH Discovery Series is also free to selected participants because it is sponsored by OhioHealth, a non-profit healthcare system, and LabCorp, a clinical laboratory network.
The Discovery Series saw a 50 percent increase in enrollment last summer and, although the acceptance rate is 50 percent, HCOM and the camp’s partners are working to increase representation and admissions.
The Dublin camp’s demographics were majority female, and about 30 percent of participants at last summer’s camp were first-generation college students.
“There is an emphasis on first-generation college students, but OU+REACH attempts to select participants that are representative of background, gender, ethnicity and school districts in Central Ohio,” said Tim Cain, associate professor of biomedical sciences at the Heritage College, Dublin and program director of OU+REACH.
The Aspiring Doctors Pre-college Pipeline Program also focuses on providing opportunities to underrepresented students.
The program works with five local high schools in Cleveland — Warrensville Heights High School, John F. Kennedy PACT High School, John F. Kennedy EAGLE High School, Whitney M. Young Leadership Academy and High Tech Academy through Cuyahoga Community College.
Since the programs are in their second and third years, it is too early to determine the “longitudinal impact” of the programs on influencing further student endeavors. There is no correlation between high school camp enrollment and undergraduate enrollment numbers on the branch campuses, Cain said.
