On just about any given weekday at Allegheny General Hospital, there are around a dozen students sitting together on the mezzanine floor with their faces pressed against glass windows. Below, a surgical team clad in scrubs and caps works together to perform heart surgery.
On a recent Tuesday, Carrick High Schoolers eagerly observed a mitral valve replacement on a patient in her late 40s. As the surgical team moves through the symphony of open-heart surgery, students are able to ask questions and get a close-up view on screen in the observation room.
“The thing that surprised me really was when we actually physically saw the heart,” said Mario Germany, a 16-year-old Carrick student. “I was like ‘My goodness!’ I [didn’t] think I’d ever see that in real life.”
All of Germany’s classmates oohed and awed as the surgeons pulled open the patient’s chest to begin the meticulous surgery.
“It was so cool to see [the heart] beating really fast and then watch the anesthetist make sure that the person is still under,” said 17-year-old Lauren Bateman. “It was also really cool to watch them suture it up to close the heart.”
Led by their biology teacher, Abbe Dirling, students learned from Angela Brown, Allegheny Health Network’s director of transplant and mechanical circulatory support, about each stage of the surgery and the critical role played by each member of the surgical team.
Brown pointed out the surgeon, circulating nurse, scrub tech, anesthesiologist, perfusionist and the cardiothoracic fellow as she explained how many different jobs could bring someone into the operating room. Below the observation windows, Dr. Masaki Tsukashita leads his team as they wire back enough space to remove and replace a malfunctioning heart valve.
The students are at Allegheny General Hospital as part of Allegheny Health Network’s open heart surgery observation program. Since 2008, the program has hosted nearly 25,000 students from 200 schools in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, according to AHN. High schools represent about 80% of those visits, but the program also offers a birds-eye view of surgeries for medical and nursing schools as well as biomedical engineering programs.
The goal is to get students excited about a career in medicine and expose them to opportunities beyond the professions of surgeon and doctor which require more than a decade of training.
Dr. Stephen Bailey, cardiac surgeon and chair of AHN’s cardiovascular unit, is the physician lead of the program. On the days he’s leading the surgery team, he often comes up to speak with the students before or after the procedure.
“I usually start out by outlining my lengthy training, which … [is] somewhere between 16 or 18 years,” he said. “And I compare that to the other end of the extreme: a scrub who's right at my right elbow during surgery and critically important. You can do that by graduating high school and doing a couple of years of technical school and be right in the mix.”
Highlighting the many jobs in the O.R. is one way the program seeks to strengthen the medical workforce pipeline. Bailey said the program is one puzzle piece of AHN’s strategy to creatively address an ongoing medical labor shortage.
“There’s a huge need,” Bailey said. “Almost every job in health care is under-sourced right now and we need people.”
On average, 20% of nursing support staff and registered nurse practitioner positions remain vacant statewide, according to the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania. In the advocacy organization’s annual workforce survey released earlier this year, the group projected that Pennsylvania is on track to suffer some of the worst shortages of nurses, nursing support professionals and mental health providers by 2026.
For Bateman, the field trip confirmed her dream of becoming a nurse. She has her eyes on a future working at Children’s Hospital and appreciated the program’s focus on different paths she could take to achieve that.
When Brown showed the students an artificial heart and told them about innovations underway to make the device smaller and more manageable, Germany said he was inspired by the idea of developing new health technologies.
“I wanted to be an ER nurse, but this might make me change my path,” he said. “Seeing how health care and technology [could] develop and go more into the future, it’s really nice. It gives people more opportunities.”
Some students who come through the observation program find themselves back at Allegheny General Hospital as an employee. Bailey said most weeks he runs into someone in the halls who was impacted by the observation program during their time as a student.
One such former student is Taylor Lambright, a perfusionist at the hospital. She’s responsible for running the cardiopulmonary bypass machine which takes over the functions of the heart and lungs during surgery. It was a job she had never heard of before Blackhawk High School made the field trip to the observation room in 2017.
“I got there and started watching the procedure and the first thing that caught my eye was this giant machine that was connected to the patient,” she said. AGH staff explained how the bypass machine oxygenates blood and pumps it back into the body — a critical function interrupted during most heart surgeries.
That set Lambright on a path to Carlow University where she studied cardiovascular perfusion. “And now I work in that O.R. that I sat above six or seven years ago,” she said.
Lambright hopes the program can continue to inspire more people to enter the medical field which she said is experiencing a labor shortage in many critical positions.
“The path to being impactful in heart surgery isn't just, you know, 18 years of becoming a surgeon,” she said. “There are so many other paths that you can take and still be touching the life of that patient on the table.”
