Careers in Healthcare Panel

Julia Forest

Copy Editor

Healthcare is so much more than just an essential field, it’s a vocational one. “When I went to college, I kind of wanted to experience everything. I wanted to try as many classes as I possibly could. I wanted to try as many career paths as I needed to find the exact right one. And my heart always led me back to nursing, which is, I think, indicative of many, many nursing students. You have this immense desire to care for others,” said Sarah Barchi, who works at MetroWest Medical Center in Framingham.

On Sept. 23, individuals from Tenet Health visited Assumption to speak to students who are interested in going into healthcare.

The panel consisted of Melissa Warwick-Schwarz, Associate Chief Nursing Officer at Saint Vincent Hospital, Andres Alvarez, Director of Nursing at Saint Vincent Hospital, Ellie Kalemkeridis, Grad recruiter for Tenet Healthcare, and Sarah Barchi, Director of Inpatient Nursing at MetroWest Medical Center. Assumption University senior Gabriel Corey was the moderator.

To those who are just starting out, there are many career and internship opportunities available in healthcare, including becoming a certified nursing assistant or a nurse’s aid.

“There’s also a lot of other positions for healthcare management students. We hire secretaries or unit coordinators, which are a little bit more on the non-clinical side, but still certainly involved in the healthcare field…there’s pretty much always opportunities in health care, regardless of whether actual patient care is your thing or not,” Barchi said.

“St. V’s, Metro West, have teams that specifically do marketing and community involvement. They do a lot with design and sort of all of the things that you see on our LinkedIn page…All of those things are posted by our marketing team and our public relations team. And then beyond that as well, there’s so many other positions through just Tenant Corporate as a whole, whether you want to stay in Massachusetts, work remotely, or interested in moving to a different state. I think we have well over, at this point, right under 100 surgical centers in hospitals across the US, so there’s so many opportunities, whether it’s within Massachusetts or even more broadly in the Tenant network,” Kalemkeridis said.

For aspiring nurses, the panel emphasized getting an externship, as that allows students to both gain experience and to find out what specific units they enjoy working for the most. They also suggested finding a mentor and networking. “For the non-clinical, I think internships are great. We do offer internships in different varieties…it’s really important to get out to the area of the field that you love and to actually go out and experience it because that will help you make decisions as you’re going through school,” Warwick-Schwarz said.

Kalemkeridis brought up the point that it’s fine if students aren’t sure what they’d like to pursue, but they should explore all their options through different opportunities. “It’s not always about your first choice and what you think you’re going to love because if you go into something with a tunnel view, that can oftentimes be really disappointing when you get there and you’re like ‘this is nothing like what I thought it was gonna be.’ So trying clubs, internships, if you don’t land your dream internship, that actually might be the best thing because you could find something that you actually didn’t think you would love. And in reality, you could land your dream internship and you end up really not liking it.”

Healthcare is constantly changing and growing, allowing new fields to always emerge. “AI and IT are absolutely sweeping into healthcare as they are within other fields. IT and nursing is incredibly important because the ability to take IT and translate it into nursing or vice versa is incredibly rare and challenging,” Barchi said.

“Radiology, anything radiology related. There’s non-invasive radiology, there’s  non-invasive cath lab, non-invasive vascular. There’s robotics now. I think radiology is a huge growing field. They’re coming out with all this amazing equipment that can detect things in such minute forms of any sort of cancer,” Warwick-Schwarz said.

“As far as the AI, obviously, the technology is very new, but some of the

things that we’re looking at is for advanced statistics…And another thing that they’re  developing for AI is the rapid readings of imaging,” Alvarez said.

With all of these new developments, those in the healthcare field must stay up to date with the latest news and trends. “They have journals which keep you up to date on all new technology that’s coming out, studies that they’ve done at other emergency rooms…I belong to certain organizations where they also have conferences for leadership where I can see innovation things that’s happening in nursing leadership and what other hospitals are doing,” Warwick-Schwarz said.

Of course, any career in healthcare is both valuable and demanding. “I think my biggest challenge, personally and professionally, is probably just the volume of the work. Every day there’s scheduling needs. There’s budgetary needs. There’s patient care needs. We have to make sure that we have enough staff on every shift and we have to make sure that that’s balanced. We have to make sure that every single patient is getting the best possible care…the only way to overcome that challenge is to work together,” Barchi said.

“I think it’s so important to really take care of yourself first. The old adage you can’t pour from an empty cup is one hundred percent applicable in nursing leadership,” she continued.

On top of all of the experiences and technical skills that one must learn, there are also many soft skills that are needed in healthcare. “I would say the biggest soft skill that you would need is compassion. Be kind. I always think that you don’t know what somebody else is going through. When I get yelled and screamed at by a patient, or they call me every name in the book sometimes, I know that they’re in bed, they’re sick, they’re not feeling well. You just have to learn to have compassion and to be kind,” Warwick-Schwarz said.

“We used to meet people at the worst times, whether it’s the patient or the family members, there’s an emergency that brought them to the hospital… Being open-minded, knowing that it’s the worst day, but you can make that worst day a little bit better,” Alvarez said.

“I think hard work and determination is really important. Everything that I’ve achieved in my life is because I’ve worked really hard for it. I studied really hard, I work really hard at work. I put a lot of effort into being a great nurse, into learning,” Barchi said.

The panel agreed that getting attached to patients can be difficult, but Warwick-Schwarz pointed out that Tenet Health also offers counseling for those who need it. “The most important thing as nurses is that we’re so tough and we take on everything that we forget to take care of ourselves and we forget to process our own emotions and feelings because you’re not human if you don’t feel for that patient that you got so close to. So I think that the one important thing is recognizing that ‘I think I need to talk to somebody about how I’m feeling about this.’ Because you’re the nurse, you’re the superwoman, you’re the one giving all the care, but you also need the care to give the care.”