AHS students qualify for international competition

In its first year, Abilene High School’s HOSA club had nine students qualify for the International Leadership Conference.

Eighteen members of the Future Health Professionals, formerly known as Health Occupations Students of America, club competed in a state competition in March. Their placings at the state level qualified them to move on to the national competition in Houston, Texas June 26-29.

Michelle Schultze, health sciences instructor, was also one of six people recognized as HOSA Advisor of the Year, an award her students nominated her for. Recalling when the winners were announced after the competition, she said she was elated to see so many Abilene students place in the top tier.

“I don’t remember who the first one was when our name came up on screen but I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ and then it just kept happening,” she said. “I was a little teary-eyed that day. We were just yelling so loud every time one of our kids were getting something or up in the top five. It was pretty cool, I was shocked.”

HOSA President Adin Bruna said the student’s success shows how much dedication they have to HOSA and Abilene. She, along with Jentree McGivney, took second place in CPR and First Aid.

“We just really wanted to put our best foot forward and make our community look good,” Bruna said. “It was really nice to, in our first year, be able to show people in Kansas that we really care and we really work hard in what we do, and if we like what we do, we’re gonna put forth the extra effort.”

To prepare for the competition she and McGivney took CPR and first aid classes and practiced a lot with the CPR dummy. With a goal to be an athletic trainer, Bruna, a senior, said CPR and first aid will help her in the future and is something she thinks everyone should know.

“It would be a worst-case scenario — this is preparation for it,” Bruna said. “If it was needed, I would be able to go into autopilot … I can be one of the people that’s right there and help out and I don’t need to worry about freaking out or anything. I can just be ready to help.”

She is also glad that the HOSA club did get started while she was still in high school. Students coming up behind he will be able to make the most out of it.

“We decided to start it because of all the people in our school who are really into healthcare and anything involved in the medical field,”Bruna said. “It just makes sense to try and help students get an idea of what fields they can go into.”

Freshmen Kenlie Delay and Hallie Johnson both competed in the Clinical Nursing competition and took first and third place respectively.

They were tested on their knowledge of tasks that nurses typically perform throughout their day. There were 10 skills they had to be prepared for, although they would only be tested on one of them.

“There were options from giving injections to inserting a catheter or post-mortem preparation of a body,” Delay said. “We had to prepare for all of them and we did not know until we got there what one we were going to do.”

They ended up delivering a subcutaneous injection, which, to her relief, was one of the skills Delay and Johnson knew how to do. She said when she first signed up for the event she didn’t know what it entailed but thought it was going to be a written or oral test.

“Once I found out that I had to do the skills, I took about a month coming in every single day to practice,” Delay said. “We didn’t have all the supplies for every single one of the skills because it’s so difficult to get them and we are so underfunded. I was only able to practice about half of them.”

She and Johnson are both looking toward careers in the medical field. Delay is eyeing OB/GYN while Johnson is planning to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a nurse.

HOSA has helped cement that plan for Johnson.

“I’ve always been interested in what (my mother) does,” Delay said. “After I started doing HOSA it started coming to me more and I really want to pursue that.

She also believes that staying with HOSA throughout her high school years will better prepare her for medical school.

“Hopefully, I can be more ahead and more experienced so I can advance more,” she said.

Sophomore Timber Jurgensen took home a second-place award in an event that combined two of her passions — healthcare and photography.

“I have always loved photography,” Jurgensen said. “When I saw that they had a photography thing, it just caught my attention.”

For her project she said she wanted to capture some of the things that people don’t often think of when considering a healthcare career.

“I did school athletic trainer, and school nurse and a CNO, which is a chief nursing officer,” Jurgensen said. “I got some background shots of them doing their jobs.”

Along with the photographs, she wrote a short piece on what the person’s job involves and a little about the responsibilities of the job.

Although she is considering sonography as a career option, Jurgensen said she likes being in HOSA because it allows her to explore other options — which is what one of the goals of the club is.

As the HOSA students make plans to attend the national competition they are hoping the Abilene community will help by supporting the fundraisers they will be having. Although the details are not hammered out yet, Schultze said she is roughly estimating it will be about $700 per student for the trip.

Placements

The Abilene High School students who earned slots at the International Leadership Conference:

— 1st Place: Kenlie Delay, Clinical Nursing

— 1st Place: Maddy Murnahan, Respiratory Therapy

— 2nd Place: Jentree McGivney and Adin Bruna, CPR and First Aid

— 2nd Place: Timber Jurgensen, Healthcare Photography

— 2nd Place: Shelton Holt, Medical Reading

— 3rd Place: Hallie Johnson, Clinical Nursing

— 3rd Place: Kaylin Flynn, Prepared Speaking

— 3rd Place: Nathan Jackson, Sports Medicine

Abilene High School also had three of the top five places, which received recognition at the state level, Those students were:

— Shelton Holt, Medical Terminology

— Maddy Murnahan and Zoey Schultze, Healthcare Career Board

— Kenlie Delay, Dental Terminology