Charlotte's Experience with CalRegional

Charlotte Mascareno is a 4th year Double Major in Molecular and Cell Biology and Global Health interested in becoming a Physician Assistant in the future. She was born and raised in Calexico, California, a border town with a majority low-income Latinx population. She has a very big interest in working with disadvantaged communities that have low access to healthcare, as her community share this struggle.

Calregional provides training for aspiring healthcare workers including but not limited to medical assistants, phlebotomy, pharmacy technician, emergency medical technicians, etc. These training are designed to be instructional but also include a hand-on externship where students are put in a professional healthcare environment and apply the skills they have learned including rooming patients, taking vitals, performing injections,

performing EKGs, collecting patient history and more.

In her FE, she worked with Urgent Care and More as a student Medical Assistant and was trained on the various aspects of medical assistant both administrative and clinical skills. Administrative skills would involved greeting patients, collecting insurance and processing eligibility, asking clarifying questions, answering the phone, entering a patient into their system, and billing and coding. Clinical skills involved rooming patients, setting up for minor procedures such as laceration stitches and wound care, taking vitals, collecting patient history, administering injections and medicines, performing EKGs, running lab tests (COVID, Flu, Mono), performing urine analysis and charting information, and discharging patients

among other tasks.

"Some challenges I faced in my FE was letting mistakes get the best of me and trying to juggle the fast paced environment. When I would make mistakes, I often let that mistake dictate my attitude for the rest of my shift, however in order to overcome this, I was reminded by other staff members that making mistakes is inevitable and we can only learn from them. I took this advice and made each mistake a learning opportunity to grow and become the best healthcare personnel I could be. In the Urgent Care, there were only about two medical assistants including myself rooming patients and performing the necessary task, so I had a hard to taking inchoative to complete task without supervision, however I was able to grow confident enough to do tasks on my own will communicating with my team on what I had completed."

Because this experience was her first step into the healthcare field, she was able to solidify that this is something she wishes to do in the future while also determining her career goal to be a physician assistant. She was able to interact with very skillful and amazing doctors who cared about their patients deeply and other medical assistant who have been working for several years, some even decades. She brought back many friendships and more staff that have given me so many words of encouragement to keep pursuing my academic and career goals.

In her free time at her FE, she would often talk to staff members, ask many questions about healthcare and their own personal experience. She would also try to connect with them on a deeper more personal level and get to know about how they grew up and the choices they made to have the career they do now.

Currently at UCSD, she is working to earn her two degrees to pursue my degree. She is also actively apart of organizations that promote higher education to underserved communities to encourage other students in low-income neighborhoods to go to college and pursue their dreams as well.