Kids explore career in medicine at camps

WARRENTON, Va. -- Again and again, 12-year-old Brianna Bowens cautiously pokes the human eyeball. On purpose.

The donated eye is tougher than you'd think. It takes a few slices with a sharp scalpel to pierce the white part -- the sclera, she learns -- and eventually remove the cornea in front.

Dissecting a human eye isn't the normal fare of summer camp. It's part of an unusual program at a small northern Virginia hospital that aims to hook kids as early as middle school on the possibilities of a medical career.

It's not for the squeamish. But no one's ever fainted over the eyes. "I've got a strong stomach," says Brianna, of Stafford, Va., who wants to be a pediatric surgeon "or maybe a nurse."

She betrays her excitement when she's done, the twig-like optic nerve, magnifying lens and clear cornea carefully laid out. Whipping out her cellphone, she exclaims, "Wait, I've got to take a picture."

Tom Gaile of the Old Dominion Eye Foundation teaches the crash course at Fauquier Hospital's medical camp, using eyes donated for education, to explain the importance of organ and tissue donation.

"This is something that's going to stay with them the rest of their lives," he says.

Programs to entice budding scientists, from building robots to measuring pollution, increasingly are becoming part of the summer ritual. On the health side, it can be harder to find hospitals that free up space and staff to give youngsters a taste of what beginning medical students learn -- how to suture skin, take blood pressure, put on a cast, insert an IV, type blood -- much less handle precious donated eyes.

But more medical camps are cropping up. And if 12 sounds young, well, Virginia in particular is targeting middle-school students so they line up enough science courses for the best shot at increasingly competitive college training programs.

"You can't wait 'til you're a senior and decide 'I want to go into health care,' " says Barbara Brown, vice president of the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association, which helps fund the camps.

She counts 760 mostly middle-school students going through one- to five-day medical camps at 26 hospitals this summer.

The idea is to show kids a wide variety of critical health careers, from nurse-anesthetists to pharmacists to physical therapists.