UPLAND — The white coats hunched around the pig on the table as transplant surgeon Dr. Thomas Butler gave the instructions.
“Belly up and that’s the way you’ve got to cut it,” he directed. “All the organs are going to look just like this.”
His audience was a group of 8-to-16-year-olds at Crozer-Chester Medical Center’s first — and the second in the United States — ID-STEM program directed at exposing science, technology, engineering and medical careers to Black and Brown children.
“If they see someone that’s like them, then they’ll want to become that person,” Dr. Butler said.
The weeklong Crozer program, funded through the Gift of Life Donor Program’s Transplant Foundation, is modeled after last year’s Medical Internship Program, co-created by Dr. Anthony Watkins, who was then a transplant surgeon at NYU Langone.
Both the Watkins and Crozer programs were created to address the situation where data is showing a disparity in more Black medical students matriculating in the 1970s than in the last decade.
Dr. Butler said exposure to these careers, especially at young ages, gives these students the opportunity to focus their careers on STEM industries.
“(Dr. Watkins) brought similar kids, about 40 kids, to New York and did a similar program and it was successful and the data showed that it worked,” Dr. Butler said. “And so I saw that and did sort of a copycat thing in this region and the hope is that we continue this process throughout the years to come.”
Forty-eight students, mostly from the Chester Boys & Girls Club and the Chester STEM Academy, along with some children of parents who work at Crozer, attended and participated in simulations, labs, shadowing, the dissection and even an opening white coat ceremony, where each student received their own white coat complete with their name embroidered on it.
“Obviously, it was very important for us as a hospital system to support the kids that are here in the area,” Dr. Butler said. “This area is very underserved and so I wanted to give the kids who didn’t have an opportunity the opportunity to have something like this.”
Wearing his Jordans for the day, he wanted the kids to see themselves reflected in him and to know they could do this too.
Raised by a single mother on the South Side of Chicago, he’s familiar with some of the obstacles these youth face.
“In my class, there were a lot of medical students who had fathers that were docs, mothers that were docs. In the family, they had that type of support,” he said of his medical studies at Howard University, the University of California Berkeley and Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.
“These kids,” the surgeon said of his Crozer STEM class, “a lot of them, talking to them, a lot of them don’t know their fathers. A lot of them have bad situations in their houses. And, basically, we have to support them the best way that we know.”
Dr. Butler said he wanted the kids to leave the week thinking, “I can do that!”
With Black and Brown professionals from urologists to surgeons to physicians and even an agricultural scientist, the program showed the students a varied mix of professions.
“I’ve introduced them to a bunch of people and hopefully, that’s just enough to tweak their interest enough to say, ‘I’m going to try for that,’” Dr. Butler said.
One student, Sadé Stevens, 13, appreciates the opportunity.
“It’s fun,” the ninth-grader said. “I always wanted to be a nurse and be in the hospital.”
She said she was grateful “that I’ve had experience in a hospital and I’ve had experience talking to doctors and listening to how they got to where they are here today.”
Butler is optimistic his efforts will be contagious and this program and other supports for these students will continue.
“What it takes is it takes more than just me,” he said. “It takes sort of a village and a community that want to invest in them to show that things can change. I’m hoping that this is a tree of things that will happen. I’ve already gotten phone calls from physicians in their own hospital systems that are like, ‘How do you do this?’”
