Internship program tries to meet health care workforce needs

Cesiah Gonzales planned to join the Marines out of high school, but then in her sophomore year, she got an X3 internship through the nonprofit Future Focused Education. Her experience over five internships in family practice medical care, beginning in high school and continuing into college, has set her on a path to pursue medicine.

“I had patient interactions, and I saw the shortage in Spanish-speaking providers. And I figured, maybe that’s my place,” Gonzales said.

Gonzales is pursuing a nursing degree at the University of New Mexico, and her most recent internship is at the University of New Mexico Hospital’s pulmonary lab. She’s interested in a career as a combat medic or Veterans Affairs provider.

UNMH has had X3 interns since 2019, said Sara Frasch, UNM Hospital chief human resources officer. The internships include a tuition reimbursement system.

Future Focused Education is an Albuquerque-based nonprofit that runs the X3 paid internship program for high school and college students. The internships place high school or college students with local employers.

The X3 program’s goal is to start students on internships in high school, said Tony Monfiletto, executive director, Instituto del Puente at Future Focused Education. The internships include a stipend, which varies depending on the internship, according to the Future Focused Education website.

The X3 program has expanded to include X3 NeXt, which is meant to help students transition from high school into college by offering internships for people who are high school graduates or have completed a GED. The X3 NeXt program maintains a network of supportive adults who can help interns navigate class choices and help students find resources.

“We learned the hard way that support through high school isn’t sufficient to guarantee that those young people are going to transition to college and into a career,” Monfiletto said.

The internship program allows the hospital to place student interns in different types of jobs, said Frasch, including nursing, appointment scheduling and care management.

The X3 internship program is contracted with UNMH to provide 65 student interns per year for the next three years, according to Monfiletto. Overall, 1,294 interns have been placed at 172 workplaces since the internship program began.

New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich toured the pulmonary lab and met with Gonzales on Friday to promote several pieces of legislation that would create more federal support for apprenticeships.

“One of the things that I’ve realized in the last five or six years is that work-based learning works,” Heinrich said. “It’s effective. It keeps people in the pipeline, and we have these enormous workforce gaps in our economy right now.”

The Democratic senator introduced the Apprenticeship Pathways Act last June, which was modeled on the Future Focused Education program and would create financial mechanisms, like federal grants, to support work-based apprenticeships. He reintroduced the Pathways to Health Careers Act in December to provide $425 million to reauthorize a grant program that supported job training in health care, the Health Profession Opportunity Grant, which expired in 2021.

“We’re really looking for ways to systemically support apprenticeships, because we’ve just realized that they’re such a powerful and effective tool for getting people where they need to go and for creating the workforce that we’re all kind of desperate for right now,” Heinrich said.