Shaping the future of health care one classroom at a time

Looking inside Noel Montgomery’s Mount Tahoma High School classroom, you could easily mistake it for a professional medical clinic. 

Across the classroom, students dressed in scrubs use professional-grade medical equipment to practice ultrasounds, perform vital sign exams, and mimic drawing blood and suturing wounds. While they are high school students, their skill level and manner give every appearance of a group of medical professionals going about their day.

Through a partnership with MultiCare and Cambia Health Foundation, Montgomery leads a group of 16 students pursuing introductory education in healthcare and potential certification as medical assistants.

In the Healthcare Careers Academy program (HCA), students are exposed to health care careers through experiential learning, mentorship, internships, field trips and guest speakers. They learn the skills needed to become a medical assistant, discover career options in 10 different focus areas, and have the option to obtain professional credentialing at the program’s conclusion.

If they earn certification and succeed in their clinical work, they’ll be hired to MultiCare, effectively walking out of high school with a job and free training that could otherwise cost thousands of dollars.

Even as important, they have experience that points them in the direction of a career area to start exploring.

“I think a lot of high school graduates don’t necessarily know what they want to do right away,” said Mona Bontemps, director of clinical practice and development with MultiCare.

“To us, the primary value is in supporting our local community,” Bontemps said. “It’s about building a community that values healthcare and allowing students who might not otherwise have that opportunity to get their foot in the door and start a career.”

Developing the future healthcare workforce employee pipeline is another benefit. The national health care workforce shortage makes it difficult for communities to access medical care, and programs like this help off-set the problem.

“Medical assistant positions can be entry level, or they can be a career,” Botemps said.  

Training days 

On a school day at Mount Tahoma, Caleb Estrada and Dalila Ortiz partnered up to perform CPR on an adult dummy on the floor, checking the pulse, demonstrating chest compressions and using an automatic defibrillator.  

From the side, Montgomery quietly quizzed them on the compression-to-breath ratio. She doesn’t worry though – they know the answers.  

At the next station, Tasyana Francis practiced taking vitals on student Elda Lopez. Francis checked her temperature with a digital thermometer and pulse with an oximeter. When asked, Francis listed the locations on the body where a pulse can be found.

These are all skills professional medical assistants have down pat, and the students are not far behind.  

“The younger they learn these skills, the more they’ll retain them,” Montgomery said.

What might be harder to gain are the confidence and soft skills needed to make a patient comfortable as they sit through the precursor to what could be a new or nerve-wracking medical issue.

Francis has both confidence and soft skills, as evidenced in her chit chat and manner meant to put her patient at ease. As a person would hope for in an actual medical appointment, Francis explained each step to her patient, shared the results of the vitals exam and what they mean.

Montgomery quizzed Francis along the way, asking about equipment placement and what the vital results indicate.

Opening doors in health care

With a long career in the medical profession, Montgomery noted that she started as a medical assistant. She’s since worked for Harborview Medical Center and University of Washington Medical Center, covering the surgery clinic, the burn unit, in-house phlebotomy, to name a few of her focus areas.

“I’ve had the opportunity to be in the operating room, the emergency room – and to work among so many medical professionals and different specialties,” Montgomery said. “Starting as a medical assistant opened up so many more opportunities for me. Then I received the opportunity to start teaching and training people. It’s in my blood, so to speak. I have a knack for it.”

Her students agree.

“She has so much patience with us,” said Cynthia Martinez-Lemus. “We can try things over and over. She waits and watches. She encourages us to keep trying so we learn how to do it. She’s strict, and she cares.”

In considering her own pathway, Martinez-Lemus said she views an MA certification as a starting point to her goal of becoming a cardiovascular surgeon.

“My parents tell me to take every opportunity and don’t let them go to waste,” she said. “I still get a bit worried about whether I will be able to do this and succeed. But I have the trust of my classmates and teacher, so I’m not as worried.”

Francis, now a senior, has her heart set on pediatric occupational therapy. She’ll start with her MA certification to give herself “credibility, knowledge and skills,” she said. “I’m talking to family about it and making plans. This class helped me realize the opportunities available to me. And that the class itself is an opportunity. By having a pathway and people to help me figure it out, I feel organized and less stressed.”  

That’s part of the goal, said Peggy Maguire, president of the Cambia Health Foundation, which funded the grant that supports the medical assistant program at Mount Tahoma.

“We wanted to be creative in thinking about how to build the future workforce that we all need,” Maguire said. “We’re interested in supporting students from communities traditionally underrepresented in professional health care roles and to help them see themselves as valuable contributors to patient outcomes. Creating a workforce that represents the community it serves will improve the quality of care and patient satisfaction.”

The Foundation has invested $1.5 million to relieve the strain on the local behavioral health care workforce since 2022. It was drawn to the HCA program because students can discover their career journey in 10 different focus areas, including behavioral health – which is a pressing community need and a significant hurdle in making whole-person health available to all people.

Meanwhile, Francis is digging into creating her own future, discovering what she loves and how to make a life of it.

“I got it,” she said.