USD grant aids Native American students interested in medical field
The Sanford School of Medicine has received a $446,761 grant to provide guidance and aid to Native American high school students interested in the medical field.
Funded by the National Workforce Diversity Pipeline Program, the grant will be awarded to two juniors and two seniors at Red Cloud High School on the Pine Ridge Reservation and Wagner Community School on the Yankton Indian Reservation.
The grant helped kickstart the first-year of the medical school’s Native American Healthcare Scholars Program, which has been in development for several years.
“The intent is to increase the diversity of the workforce and we selected healthcare,” Gerald Yutrzenka, associate dean for diversity and inclusion at the USD medical school, said. “The idea is to diversify the healthcare workforce and we’ve been very much involved with representing the Native American peoples in healthcare.”
Students who receive this grant will be paired with a counselor representing USD, who will guide them through the process. The grant will last for five years and will only be offered to students in Redcloud and Wagner. Applications will open up by December and grant recipients will be chosen this spring.
“What we will do is work with them, along with their teachers and counselors, to help advise them towards careers in healthcare and also provide some mentoring and build their interest in what they want to do,” Yutrzenka said.
The medical school has also made it a goal to keep in touch with the recipients’ families.
“We have found that getting the support from family back home is huge, especially in the Native population where it is very family oriented,” said Indians Into Medicine Program Coordinator Kathy Van Kley.”What we are going to do is work with the families of these students, bring the family to campus and try to explain to them how important their support is.”
Van Kley, who works with high school students on the reservations, said the grant will have positive results.
“It’s personally important to me because when I go out and work on the reservations, I work with so many amazing and smart kids,” Van Kley said. “The trials that they go through to go to school is something that is not comparable. I really believe that these kids will go back to the reservations one day and help make things right there.”
For Yutrzenka, the grant is a way to get one step closer to achieving diversity in the medical field.
“I’m the associate dean for diversity at the medical school, so these kind of efforts are a part of what we as a medical are trying to accomplish,” Yutrzenka said. “More personally, I have been working with Native American students and the like for about 25 years and have had several efforts over the years to reach out to medical students to gain this kind of exposure.”
Physiology professor Barbara Goodman, who is involved with Native American students and research careers in the medical school, said the grant will take recruiting students one step further.
“Once we recruit students, the retention part seems to be a problem,” Goodman said. “We need to have follow through with the students so that they will adjust better to a different culture and being away from family. It is something that we are trying to better here at USD and this will help.”
