Start out: building healthcare careers for minority teenagers

The healthcare industry is currently experiencing a severe shortage of nurses and other allied healthcare professionals. To compound this crisis, the current workforce does not mirror the growing linguistic and cultural diversity of the population needing health care. This article describes a community partnership approach to creating educational and career opportunities in nursing and other health sciences for young, multicultural, bilingual teenagers.

Several community organizations joined together to design and implement an 8-week summer program entitled "Start Out," which served to integrate life planning, mentorship, nursing assistant training, and college application assistance while providing summer salary stipends and work scholarship opportunities. Twenty-seven students participated in the program.

Twenty-four bilingual, economically disadvantaged teenagers 16 to 19 years old, from the greater Seattle metropolitan area, completed the first session of this innovative program and passed the certified nursing assistant examination.

Culturally focused assistance programs may provide an avenue to meet the current nursing shortage and provide healthcare workers who can be sensitive to the cultural and linguistic needs of the growing ethnic population.