
- #MY PENN MEDICINE CAREERS HOW TO#
- #MY PENN MEDICINE CAREERS PROFESSIONAL#
- #MY PENN MEDICINE CAREERS ZIP#
Just last year, Fortune reported that Black women make up less than 3% of all active physicians in the United States. Of the three cohorts of Skills Initiative graduates who joined Penn Medicine in the fall, 93% are Black, 90% are women, and five have bachelor’s degrees.ĭicks said that’s a step in the right direction, since Black people, and Black women in particular, face racial disparities in health care.
#MY PENN MEDICINE CAREERS ZIP#
In four of the five ZIP codes that encompass West Philadelphia, 79% or more of the population is Black, according to 2019 data compiled by.

“The program just unlocked a lot of things that people may have tucked away over life’s trials, or over COVID, people losing jobs and being underemployed.” They asked us, ‘Where do you see yourself in the next 10 years?” Dicks said. “And here all these years later, this opportunity comes in where I can become an assistant in the lab, and kind of get my foot in the door.”ĭicks credited the program for giving her and the other lab assistants the financial stability and encouragement they needed to pursue their passion. “I graduated in ’96 as a lab technician, but I was never able to work in a field because I didn’t have the experience,” said Dicks, who got her associate degree at a technical school. She received her associate degree at Maccarrie Technical School. Dicks suffers from lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, which she said prevented her from working a 9-5 job.
#MY PENN MEDICINE CAREERS HOW TO#
“All these excited, relatively young people, they were just, like, bursting with excitement learning how to do this work, we just love to be able to help the community.”Īmong those hired was Vanessa Dicks, a 46-year-old mother who yearned to be back in the medical field while undergoing her own health issues during the pandemic. Roth said the new hires have become a valuable part of the team. But these individuals can get more technical training in the lab so they can do more.” “I hope the testing is going to go away at some point and we will get back to something more resembling normal. “We’re looking long term, we’re not just looking for testing,” Roth said. To be accepted into the lab assistant program, a high school degree or equivalent is required. David Roth, the Simon Flexner Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the university’s Perelman School of Medicine, said the lab assistants supervise sample collections, work on sample preparation tests, and more. and plans to open eight additional sites.ĭr. Today, most of the 50 new lab assistants work on campus, although Penn does offer testing off-campus. It allowed them to have faith in the people that were coming through the program and remove the prior-experience requirement that they normally have for lab assistants.” “It was really exciting to bring all those folks to the programming and build that partnership with Penn Medicine, especially around the technical training exposure that they were able to provide. “We did that three times in a row, and everybody who interviewed got a job offer from Penn,” Park said. Park said trainees received a stipend over the four-week program.
#MY PENN MEDICINE CAREERS PROFESSIONAL#
First, newcomers completed a virtual two-week professional development program before being interviewed, then accepted trainees completed two-week lab basic training at Penn.

The initiative surpassed expectations, bringing in 50 people. Joshua Park, who is the senior manager, strategy and partnerships, at West Philadelphia Skills Initiative, said they were set to launch the first recruitment in a partnership for patient service representatives at Penn Medicine’s Access Center back in March 2020 when the pandemic cut those efforts short.īut this time around, Penn Medicine said it needed 40 lab assistants.

This is not the first time that WPSI and Penn Medicine teamed up in search of new employees. The idea was to offer new opportunities to program graduates looking for jobs as Penn Medicine was looking for workers. With an eye toward expanding coronavirus testing in their part of the city, the University of Pennsylvania Health System partnered back in the fall with the West Philadelphia Skills Initiative, a University City District workforce development program.

