WHS offers hands-on educational programs with paid training
Washington Health System is training the next generation of healthcare employees in-house. Those looking for quality, hands-on education can even get paid while completing their coursework.
Employing more than 2,000 highly trained medical professionals, WHS provides healthcare services at more than 40 off-site locations throughout three counties. In addition, WHS has diagnostic centers, outpatient care facilities, the Wilfred R. Cameron Wellness Center, the Center for Recovery and Wellness and hospice care, all working together to provide excellent patient and family-centered care.
WHS continues to build its medical professional pipeline through its educational programs.
In the WHS Medical Assistant in Training Program, students are hired as full-time employees and work 40 hours per week, earning a paycheck right from the start, said Judy Zieger, who oversees the program.
The curriculum includes online and in-person clinical training and takes five months to finish, with 492 online and 300 clinical hours. WHS provides a computer training room on-site to take the online portion. After completion, participants are guaranteed a full-time position in one of their Washington Physicians Group or family medicine offices.
If accepted, WHS covers the costs for online classes and also provides all the hands-on clinical training in their simulation center as well as on-site at its WPG and family medicine offices.
“We started this program to address turnover and recruitment because we would typically see large turnovers in that position. Then we’d run into issues recruiting because there were not enough people trained in this field to fill all the openings in the Southwestern PA area,” Zieger said. “In the past, we would recruit a lot from the trade schools like Penn Commercial, Laurel Business Institute, those types of places where they had medical assistant training programs. But we noticed a decline in enrollees in their programs too, which greatly impacts us. We didn’t have any potential employees to even bring in for internships and, in turn, couldn’t fill these types of positions. So we decided to create our own program.”
Zieger said WHS has been recruiting area schools for interested students in the program.
“2020 was our first class,” Zieger said. “We had four participants. We joined up with an online program called CareerStep. They cover all the didactic work that the participants need to complete for the medical assistant and training program. When they complete the 492 hours of the online training, they graduate with a certificate of medical assistant. Then they have the opportunity if they want to sit for their Pennsylvania certification, but we don’t require it.”
Zieger said during the recruitment phase the prospective students are invited to an open house to discuss the program and ask questions.
Phlebotomists are professionals trained to draw blood from a patient for clinical or medical testing. It has also been a challenge for many local health systems, including WHS, to hire and retain quality phlebotomy staff members due to a shortage of qualified candidates in the area. WHS initiated a paid training program for phlebotomy to address this shortage.
The phlebotomist-in-training completes required classroom and clinical education requirements under the supervision of a phlebotomist in collecting and processing blood samples and other specimens for inpatients and outpatients. Students are responsible for meeting and maintaining established medical and laboratory protocols said Misty Carter-Beard, who oversees the program.
WHS has sponsored a number of individuals to complete the phlebotomy training program which requires 80 hours of classroom training and 80 hours of clinical training. Upon finishing the program, students will sit for a phlebotomy certification exam and are hired as WHS phlebotomists.
The Washington Health System pharmacy technician-in-training program is the newest offering in WHS’s “Earn-and-Learn” portfolio. It is a part-time educational program.
WHS provides and pays for both the education and clinical skills platform to become a pharmacy technician in as little as nine months with the syllabus and the online-based learning provided by MedCerts.
Program participants are supervised by a pharmacy staff member while working on required classroom and clinical education and assist professional staff in processing and delivering drug orders and medications.
“What we’re finding with pharmacy technicians is they are also needle in a haystack, so we’re basically following the same protocol we did on the other two successful programs,” said Stacey Testa, director of Human Resources at WHS.
Testa said a prospective student fills out an application and then meets with staff to gauge their career interests.
“We bring them in for an interview and ensure that they know what they are getting into,” Testa said. “Many of these individuals for all three programs are not in the healthcare field, and they want to get in, but they need to know what they’re getting into and be successful, and we want them to be successful.”
WHS also partners with Ambulance and Chair to educate and create new emergency medical service providers for the area. Those classes are held at the WHS Wilfred R. Cameron Wellness Center.
Ambulance and Chair EMS currently has four locations serving Washington County, which includes 34 municipalities, now including North Strabane, said Larry Pollock, director of Ambulance and Chair.
Their clinical staff includes paramedics, advanced emergency medical technicians, EMTs, prehospital registered nurses and emergency dispatchers. In addition, Ambulance and Chair consists of a training and community outreach team, fleet mechanics and administrative staff to support the operations.
“We do an advanced EMT program, Advanced Emergency Medical Technician program, which is the only advanced Life support class in Washington County,” he said. “And then we do a lot of continuing education with the fire department and ambulance services.”