Encouraging diversity in health care
REACH program is designed to bring youth of color into the field sooner rather than later
Jayline Perez, 21, graduated three semesters early from Roosevelt University in December 2021.
With her parents and grandparents only having gone through elementary school, Perez credits Rush Education and Career Hub, or REACH, with changing her future.
“I grew up kind of not really knowing that college was an option for me,” she said. “REACH was one of the only outlets I ever had besides my high school encouraging me to go to college.”
Now Perez is studying for the Medical College Admission Test and looking forward to a career in medicine. Neuroscience interests her, but she may change her mind.
Perez is also working with her mentor, Dr. Susan Lopez, director of diversity, equity and inclusion for graduate medical education at Rush University Medical Center, helping with COVID-19 health disparities research (working with the data of COVID-19 patients to look at differences in outcomes by the need for Spanish interpretation) and organizing pre-med “boot camps” for Black and Latinx teens.
Perez’s path to health care started when she joined REACH during her junior year in high school as part of After School Matters. The Belmont Cragin resident was interested in health care to some extent, but her summer internship at Rush University Medical Center with REACH’s MedSTEM
Explorers program, a session with hands-on learning and skill development, made it stick. Perez recalls the orientation to the program giving her a sense of belonging.
“I saw that it was mostly women that were running the program … it’s kind of like, ‘Wow, there’s actually women that look like me out here,’ ” she said. “They were able to understand my struggles, and I was surrounded by students that have a very similar story like mine.
“I always felt like people probably wouldn’t understand me because of my
cultural background. I grew up with, here in the Northwest Side, all the barriers I had to continue to jump trying to avoid the traps of poverty. When they brought in other students like that, I realized that I wasn’t the only one.”
Perez started with REACH in 2018, but her emotions from finding the truth behind the words “Representation matters” are still evident years later.
“They were not just giving us clinical experience like working with patients or having that communication with other health care providers,
that kind of resource,” Perez said. “They were also developing a sense of believing in ourselves.
“When you have interns helping a patient, even if it’s serving water or bringing some washcloths, you’re doing something for them, and for me it was ‘I can actually help. I can actually go further from here.’ ”
In 2021, of the students served by REACH 75% were female, 90% were West Side residents, 88% were Black or Latinx and 65% were first-generation college attendees.
The program provided more than 180 high school and college interns with more than 25,000 paid, work-based learning hours, and helped 50% of MedSTEM Pathways interns and 100% of MedSTEM Explorers to earn one or more industry-recognized credentials (i.e., CPR, first aid/ basic lifesaving, phlebotomy technician or ECG technician).
The Rush Education and Career Hub is a pipeline for students from prekindergarten through college to participate in science and math enrichment opportunities. Its mission is to increase diversity in STEM and health care professions.
“I don’t want our students to just be patient transport,” aid REACH executive director Rukiya Curvey Johnson. “Yes, you can start there, but I want you to be able to do more if you want to.
“They should be the physicians, they should be the research scientists, they should be some of the anesthesiologists. So what can we do to directly get them on that path, being able to access higher wages and therefore more benefits and a happier or a better quality of life?”
Curvey Johnson has been with REACH for five years and is the former executive director of STEM and strategic initiatives at Chicago Public Schools. Having been on the educational side for years, she said she saw REACH as an opportunity to be able to inform the pipeline on the industry side.
With 10 partnering schools on the West Side and seeking more, she wants every REACH student to feel what Perez feels about their future: a sense of ownership, confidence, self-agency and a chance to give back.
“That’s something we try to cultivate in all of our students,” Curvey
Johnson said. “Building a sense of self-efficacy about what they can do to actively create change, to be a community problem-solver, to be able to address some of the disparities they see but also just bring others along.
“The fact that Jayline stepped up with her sister and (they are) co-leading our med school boot camp program, it’s just phenomenal. It’s that relationship-building and having this sort of peer support to engage with which is so incredibly important.”
Individuals don’t need to know what health care path they want to follow, they just have to show an interest. REACH wants to spark that interest.
“You can actually click ‘I like helping people,’ and it’ll take you to a couple of careers that align with that,” Curley Johnson said. “And you’ll get a chance to engage and look at not only our programs (but) other programs around the city as well and activities that they can do that can help further and deepen that interest.”
As for Perez, she’s just getting started. Her work of giving back will continue,
“God willing, as a medical student in about a year,” she said.
She’s also looking to be a resource for others who look like her.
“A lot of these health care disparities, one of the factors is that there’s not many professionals in medicine that come from underrepresented communities,” Perez said. “(REACH is) building up those professionals.
“I know they’re very open, not just to health care but also IT and other programs. Hopefully one day that evolves into helping another person, as a patient or not a patient, eventually bridge that gap.”