Five years ago, Kirsten Gateless was a junior at West Virginia’s Davis & Elkins College who dreamed of becoming a physician. This May, Gateless is on track to graduate with a medical degree from West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine (WVSOM) and hopes to specialize in surgery or emergency medicine.
The Flatwoods, W.Va., native said she couldn’t have done it without the Green Coat program, a partnership between WVSOM’s Rural Health Initiative (RHI) and Davis Medical Center in Elkins, W.Va., that allows undergraduate students to get an early glimpse of what it’s like to work in a hospital. Gateless is one of three aspiring physicians who have completed the program at Davis and gone on to pursue medical degrees at WVSOM.
“I knew from my freshman year that I wanted to go to medical school,” Gateless said. “I was always interested in the sciences. And I knew I wanted to go beyond nursing, because where I grew up, everybody expects women in health care to be nurses, and I didn’t want to do that.”
Through the WVSOM Green Coat program, students at Davis & Elkins learn about clinical responsibilities through exposure to at least 15 different departments at Davis Medical Center. They shadow physicians and other health care professionals, communicate with patients and assist staff as needed. A Green Coat student might transport patients to tests, help answer call lights, or participate in “comfort rounding,” visiting or playing games with patients in need of social interaction.
Gateless heard about the Green Coat program from her biology professors at Davis & Elkins during her sophomore year and completed the semester-long program the following fall. She said the experience gave her an opportunity to observe a variety of health care settings.
“I worked in an outpatient clinic with nurses, I shadowed doctors as they talked to patients and I was able to work with a couple of WVSOM students who were rotating at Davis. I visited the inpatient pharmacy, the inpatient physical therapy ward and the oncology suite,” Gateless said. “I even got to see a couple of surgeries, which was really beneficial, because even though I thought surgery was something I wanted to do, it was great to see it in real life and know that I wasn’t going to pass out.”
To apply for the Green Coat program, a student must be a college sophomore or junior majoring in health sciences, and must have a grade point average of 3.0 or higher and a recommendation from a program director or advisor. Accepted students are required to work 8-10 hours per week for 20 weeks.
Valerie Bright, Davis Medical Center’s coordinator of volunteer services, oversees WVSOM’s Green Coat program at the facility. She said 30 students have participated in the program since its inauguration in the 2015-16 academic year.
“Students who apply for this and are accepted are goal-oriented. They know what they want and they’re dedicated to their education,” Bright said. “It’s encouraging to know that these are the people who are going to be our future health care providers.”
One of those future health care providers is Trey Furby, of WVSOM’s Class of 2022. A native of Belington, W.Va., Furby, like Gateless, learned about the program while attending Davis & Elkins College, where he earned degrees in biology, chemistry and history. Furby said the Green Coat program helped confirm his desire to someday practice in rural West Virginia. As a student at WVSOM, he joined the RHI program to further advance his understanding of health care challenges in rural regions.
“The Green Coat program helped me decide I eventually want to stay close to home and work in a rural area,” said Furby, who is applying to residency programs in family medicine in anticipation of his medical school graduation. “My plan is to come back after residency and work either in Barbour County or a surrounding county, so that I can serve the people who raised and took care of me while I was growing up.”
In addition to the three Green Coat students at Davis who have gone on to attend WVSOM, a fourth plans to enter the school’s Class of 2026 this fall. But Rebecca Thacker, who coordinates WVSOM’s RHI program, explained that the Green Coat program isn’t designed just to bring students to the Lewisburg-based osteopathic medical school.
“The goal is to enhance students’ opportunities for acceptance into various health care professions,” Thacker said. “It’s not just focused on turning students into osteopathic physicians. We’ve had Green Coat participants go to each of the state’s three medical schools. We have students who have gone into dentistry, nursing, radiology and other fields. We want them to see different levels of practitioners in multiple departments in a clinical setting so that we can expand the health care workforce in West Virginia.”
Bright said she has personally seen the program help students identify a direction for their career.
“Part of the idea is to help students decide what they want,” she said. “There might be a pivotal moment during the program where a participant says, ‘Now I know for sure that this is the direction I want to go in.’ And some come in aiming for medical school, but after their rotations they say, ‘I’m changing my track because I want to be a physician’s assistant’ or ‘I’m going to nursing school.’”
Additionally, Bright said she tries to tailor the program to meet the needs of individual students through “specialty of choice” rotations.
“We had one student who was interested in pathology, so I worked with our pathologist and got them an extra rotation. We had one who was interested in general surgery. I talked to one of our general surgeons, and she took her for a day,” Bright said.
For Gateless, the Green Coat program solidified her resolve to enter medical school at WVSOM. She pointed out that students at small undergraduate colleges such as Davis & Elkins often have few opportunities to gain real-world experience in medical facilities.
“Green Coat gave me the opportunity to make sure medicine was where I wanted to be,” Gateless said. “If I hadn’t had this program, I wouldn’t have had any idea what happens in a hospital until my third year of medical school.”
College students who would like to apply to the program can do so at www.wvsom.edu/academics/programs/rhi/greencoat. The application deadline for the fall 2022 semester is April 1. For more information, contact Rebecca Thacker at rthacker@osteo.wvsom.edu or 304-647-6298.
WVSOM also offers a Green Coat program through Charleston Area Medical Center. That program is currently on hold as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.