Medical internships open doors of opportunity for underrepresented students

For nine weeks this summer, a group of six future health care professionals is learning firsthand how a top-tier hospital works, through an internship aimed primarily at Black, Hispanic, Asian and immigrant college students at Northwell Health’s Long Island Jewish Valley Stream Hospital.

Valley Stream’s Hospital Management Program put them in the operating room as surgeons performed knee replacements and gallbladder removals. They sat in on interviews as a nurse manager culled a list of job candidates, looking for the perfect fit for a clinical team. This week, they will shadow hospital executives who make high-level decisions about budget and strategy.

“I am the first in my family to attend college, and I have no family members in medicine,” said Raquel Rubio, 19, a New York University junior from the Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point whose family moved to the United States from El Salvador.

When the internship program started in June, Rubio was most interested in hospital management, but after watching the Valley Stream hospital’s nurse managers work, she is also considering that profession.

Whatever profession she picks, she said, she hopes to work in a hospital in a low-income community. “I’ve witnessed how my neighbors suffered from lack of insurance and how that led to health care complications in the long run,” she said. To reach the hospital each day by 8 a.m., she leaves home by 5:45 a.m., taking the subway, Long Island Rail Road, and finally, a NICE bus.

Valley Stream’s program, started in 2019, pays its interns $18 per hour. It is one of many at hospitals and medical schools on Long Island and around the nation intended to introduce underrepresented high school and college students to medical careers. Program graduates from previous years have gone on to medical and nursing school. At least one is a registered nurse working in the Northwell system.

One program graduate, Kourtney Bobb, 21, a rising Dartmouth College senior from Baldwin, is poised to interview for Northwell’s two-year management associate program. “I could begin my career here,” she said.

Similar programs at Stony Brook University’s Renaissance School of Medicine helped the school raise the portion of underrepresented students from 12% to about 25% over the last 15 years, said Dr. Andrew Wackett, vice dean of undergraduate medical education. Some of those students have gone on to practice medicine at Stony Brook hospitals.

Advantages seen in diverse workforce

Research suggests that a diverse health care workforce serves patients better. For example, a study published last year in the journal JAMA Network Open found a correlation between higher levels of Black representation within the physician workforce and better health outcomes for Black patients. Other work has shown that pairing patients with limited English proficiency with health care providers who speak their language of choice improves health outcomes.

“We need the workforce to be more reflective of the communities that we serve,” said Dr. David Battinelli, Northwell’s executive vice president and physician in chief. “To be able to deliver the empathetic, compassionate care that’s required, it’s clear that people of like backgrounds do that better.”

Northwell, the state’s largest health care provider, is “not where we need to be,” Battinelli said. He said that change would take years, partly because of the time it takes to train medical professionals. For a doctor, “it takes about 12 years to educate and train someone … that’s how far upstream we have to go.”

In 2022, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, 56.5% of active physicians identified as white, 18.8% as Asian, 6.3% as Hispanic or Latino, and 5.2% as Black. In 2023, according to the association, Black and Hispanic or Latino students comprised 10% and 12.7% of all medical school matriculants, respectively. Both portions were up from previous years, though experts have said a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that restricts medical schools and other higher learning institutions from considering an applicant’s race or ethnicity in admissions decisions could affect that trajectory.

The association’s data also showed increased economic diversity of matriculants, with more first-generation matriculants and more with a parent whose highest level of education was less than a bachelor’s degree or who worked in service and clerical jobs.

Tatiana Rodriguez, a project manager at Valley Stream who runs the program, said her own experience was similar to many of the interns she mentors. She grew up translating for her Dominican mother at parent-teacher conferences, got her first job at 14, and worked in a pediatrician’s office and at a dental school before coming to Northwell.

“We are always going to have someone holding the ladder for them here,” she said.

Family ties to medicine

When the program ends next month, the interns will have shadowed or had contact with Northwell staffers in about 20 different roles, Rodriguez said, giving them experiences that some people won’t get until after medical school.

Rodriguez keeps in contact with program graduates, she said. “We are keeping our promises — we stay in contact, and if we are able to provide them with a career and a job, we do,” she said.

Some of the students in this year’s cohort of Northwell interns have family ties to medicine.

Shreyasi Saha, 19, a rising Stony Brook University junior from Jamaica, Queens, said her parents were doctors in their native Bangladesh. She said she was weighing career paths from health care administration to hospital technician and technologist. The up-close experience of the internship was “exactly the type of exposure that I needed," she said.

"My parents can tell me about the crazy cases they had, the hours they spent working, but I’d never been in a hospital or in a patient’s room while they’re having a Code Blue,” or medical emergency, she said.

Kezia White, 18, a Valley Stream Central High School graduate who plans to attend St. John's University as a biomedical science major in the fall, also comes from a medical family: Her father and brother are nurses. But it was the experience of her younger sister, who is living with leukemia after a 2018 diagnosis, that made her want to become a doctor.

“I was just around doctors and nurses who helped her,” White said. “The experience made me very mature at a very young age.”