ANAHEIM : Jobs Give Youths a Look at Medical Field

David Flores has a job cleaning and sterilizing surgical instruments at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center.

Matt Erlandson helps out in the hospital’s emergency room, taking patients’ vital signs and assisting the nurses and doctors.

Josh Wilson prepares tissue samples for the pathology lab, and a doctor has taught him what breast cancer looks like under a microscope.

Not bad for two recent high school graduates and a third teen-ager who will soon be entering his senior year.

All are part of Kaiser’s Summer Youth Employment Program, which takes 35 Orange County high school students and graduates and thrusts them into the hospital for six weeks of intensive on-the-job training. The 25-year-old program employs another 357 students at other Kaiser hospitals in Southern California.

The youths are paid the minimum wage of $4.50 an hour for 40 hours a week of work and attend classes on such topics as cardiopulmonary resuscitation and drug and alcohol abuse.

Darlene Maye, a recruiter for the program, said Kaiser’s goal is to show the students that they don’t have to become a doctor or a nurse to have a career in medicine.

“We want to give them an idea of whether or not (medicine) is something they really want to work in,” Maye said. “And a lot of them say they want to be a nurse or a doctor, but we also want to show them there are other jobs in pathology, radiology, food preparation and administration.”

For Flores, an 18-year-old who recently graduated from Santa Ana High School, his job begins when soiled instruments are returned to the Central Services Department from the operating room. He works the tools through a several-step process that cleans and sterilizes them, sorts them and then places them on trays to be returned to the operating room.

It’s quite a difference from his other job at a pizza parlor.

“I had no idea what it was when I heard I would be working in Central Services,” Flores said.

He plans to attend Southern California College in Costa Mesa this fall and wants to become a physical therapist. “But I’ve learned a lot. I learned that we all have to depend on each other. I see other people who have worked here a long time asking questions, which makes me feel more comfortable. At my other job, I’m just usually by myself.”

On one recent morning, Kaiser’s emergency room was empty, and Erlandson, who has worked as a grocery store box boy, was being taught how to find information using the hospital’s computer. But there have been other times when the room has been filled with patients.

“Most jobs are repetitive, but what goes on here is never the same,” said Erlandson, 18, a recent graduate of El Modena High School in Orange. He will soon be going to Spokane, Wash., to take part in a firefighter training program in hopes of becoming a paramedic. He said he was surprised by the attention he has been given by the doctors and nurses.

“The doctors will take time to tell you what they are doing,” he said. “They’re not big shots--they’re really cool.”

Wilson, 16, will be a senior at Foothill High School in Tustin this fall and had never had a job before he was assigned to Kaiser’s pathology lab. His job normally entails putting name tags on tissue samples, cutting up samples and preparing them for viewing on a microscope.

But once or twice a week, the aspiring marine biologist gets to sit with a pathologist as the doctor examines the tissue for signs of disease.

“One doctor has taught me how to recognize two types of breast cancer,” Wilson said. “The next time a sample comes in, he’s going to let me take a look after he does to see if I can pick it out.”