Youth Med-Surg Discovery
A simulated residency your child runs on their own phone, ending in four hours inside a real clinical environment with their hands on real tissue.
What you will learn
- How a heart and a set of lungs actually work — by holding them, not by seeing a diagram
- How to tie a surgical knot and place a suture that holds
- How a sterile field is set up, and why breaking it matters
- Hands-only CPR, properly, to the point where you could use it
- What tissue looks like under a microscope and how to read it
- How a disease actually develops and progresses — anatomy and physiology tied to real clinical cases
- What a PA, an anesthesiologist and a surgeon each actually do all day — from them, not from a website
What you leave with
You will have sutured, held a human heart, and worked a mock operating room — and you will know, honestly, whether medicine is for you.
Before the workshop — First Call
In testing · not yet run with a cohortThe student is the intern on night float. They are assigned a patient. The nurse pages them when something changes, and the patient reacts to what they decide — including what they decide not to do. It runs in a browser on a phone, and it is free.
How the rotation works
- Nobody starts on the ward. Orientation comes first — the team, the numbers, the words, how to ask for help. About eight minutes.
- Every lesson ends with a short quiz, then a full review giving the right answer and the reason for every question. Nobody fails. The review is the teaching.
- Finishing a lesson unlocks a kind of patient on the ward.
- They are never told what is wrong with the patient. Working that out is the job.
- Patients are dealt at random, with different names, ages and numbers every time, so nothing can be memorised.
- Every order asks them why before it goes in, then shows exactly what their decision did to the patient.
- At the end they present the patient on rounds, head to toe, and get a debrief.
- A report card sends them back to the specific lessons their own calls show they need.
- They choose the length of their rotation, one to four weeks, and it counts down to the workshop.
What the curriculum covers
Six tracks and fourteen modules, built to keep growing: chronic disease, infection, internal medicine, women’s health, cancer and surgery.
Chronic disease comes first and goes deepest — type 2 diabetes, obesity and metabolic syndrome, coronary artery disease, peripheral artery disease, high blood pressure. That is a deliberate choice. For a young person in Southeastern San Diego, City Heights, Barrio Logan or National City, that module is not abstract. It is about their own family.
What helps them along
- A reference they can open mid-shift — every medication, lab, vital sign and test in the app, with normal ranges and what high and low actually mean, in plain language beside the real clinical vocabulary.
- A glossary with pronunciation, and a voice that says each word slowly. A student who cannot say tamponade out loud will not say it in front of people.
- A coach that points at what they have not looked at and asks the right question, and never gives them the answer.
- An interactive model of the circulation they can drive with their own hands.
First Call is built and being tested. It has not yet been run with a cohort, and it is not yet on a public address. There is no download link here because there is not one to give you yet. The workshop runs as described either way — the rotation is what we are adding in front of it.
