VIDEO: Girl Scout’s Partner With Baptist To Encourage Girl’s To Enter The Health Field

NEW ALBANY,  Miss. (WCBI)- Girl Scouts Heart of the South and Baptist Hospitals facilities in Mississippi teamed up to host an event aimed at encouraging young girls to consider careers in the health field.

The Girl Scouts came to Baptist Memorial Hospital Union County to participate in the “More than Scrubs Program”. It was a hands on career exploration day for Girl Scouts in grades 4-12th, giving them the chance to learn about careers in the healthcare field as a paramedic, nurse, radiology technician, and phlebotomist.

Olivia Bennett is the Community and Occupational Health Coordinator at Baptist.

“We provided this opportunity to the girl scouts in our area to kind of show them what all options they have in the health care field. I think it’s very important and this opportunity today to show that there’s more to health care than just nurses and doctors. There’s the lab. There’s the emergency room staff. There’s radiology. There’s lots of things that they can do in the health care field,” says Bennett.

“They do a lot of community service work and they learn a lot from each other to be more confident and outgoing and courteous helpful all those kinds of things. They earn patches doing all kinds of things. Today they’re earning their health care patch,” says Scout Leader Courtney Coggins.

The girls really enjoyed their experience, including Coggins daughter Summer.

“My experience today was really good. I liked learning about bacteria and all kinds of CPR motions and we learned that in the ambulance they have all kinds of medical things,” says Summer.

“It was really cool. They showed us all the different ways what the nurses and the doctors do. And they taught us a little bit about how if we came here what we would get to do. And they really showed us what they’re real experience was,” says Maggie McNutt.

“I enjoyed it. We learned how to do CPR and how they train the nurses and the ambulance what they do when they have a patient coming in if they’re sick. And there are new things that they have that they have to use on the patients. I think it would be cool for me. I think I would love it and I like working on people already at my house,” says Madison Coltharp.

Jaleaha Green from Tupelo got to learn the finer points of proper scrubbing for surgery.

“The soap that we used. We washed our hands and then we dry them and we got under this bug thing and it showed if we washed our hands very good and it still showed the germs that you didn’t get off and that’s very good,” says Green.

And the girls wrapped up their day with lunch proceeded by a class on healthy nutrition.