The Healthcare Program

The Healthcare Program

Greenbrier West High School is full of different opportunities to further your workplace knowledge and experience. Ranging from Welding to Culinary Arts, the Career Technical Education (CTE) programs here at West make finding your dream job and enhancing your skills easy and accessible. As a current sophomore wanting to become a delivery nurse in the future, GWHS’s Healthcare program especially sparked my interest.

The Healthcare program at Greenbrier West is run by Beth Carrol. Her classes learn skills such as CPR, identifying the different parts of the human body, knowing about personality disorders and abnormal psychology, and other vital aspects of working in the healthcare field.

Every student at West has the opportunity to take Ms. Carrol’s courses, but only some will follow through to become “completers” in the program. If students wish to become a completer in health sciences, there are five classes they have to take: three as a junior, and two as a senior. Completer’s must have at least an 80% to apply for clinical specials.

The Healthcare program can be very beneficial to those who wish to go into the medical field, such as 2020 graduate Destiny Redden. Destiny is currently going to WVU Tech for a degree in nursing, and as a student that participated in the Healthcare program during high school, she says that the classes helped prepare her greatly.

“Healthcare in highschool was such a large help in allowing me to understand some of the things I’m learning now, especially anatomy. Even if I don’t completely understand what [my professor] says during a lecture, thanks to medical terminology I can normally pick up on some of the terms and figure out what she’s saying. While I’m still mostly still in general studies right now, I can tell that having some knowledge in healthcare language is helping me tremendously.”

Another student from West, current senior Logan Vandall, has also seen benefits from taking healthcare, and is  now working with the pharmacy at Rainelle Medical Center. Logan says that  “thanks to healthcare, I have been able to experience some aspects of the medical field that have left me wanting to pursue a future career in a medical profession. I have learned a lot at my clinical site and have realized this is what I want to do in my life.”

The medical field can be a tough one to go into, dealing with strange parts and functions of the body, as well as dealing with death and injury on a regular basis. However, I look forward to preparing myself in the Healthcare program and becoming a delivery nurse in the future. It will be difficult, and it won’t be anything like Grey’s Anatomy, but you have to put in work to be successful, and I know it will be worth it.