PITTSBURG, Kansas — A chorus of tiny “ewwws” echoes down a hallway at the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas’ John U. Parolo Education center.
Donned in safety goggles, disposable gloves and miniature, white lab coats, about a dozen kids crowd around tables in a classroom.
“It smells disgusting,” a kid declares. “It’s so scary!” said another.
At the center of the tables lies the source of their disgust: dead frogs. The students are learning about anatomy by watching frog dissections.
The amphibian anatomy isn’t just for fun. These kids are participating in a spring break camp aimed at introducing them to careers in health care in a memorable way. Hopefully one day, these frog memories might cause the children to consider careers in health care. The organizers view it as a way to help solve a long-term problem: shortages in the medical workforce.
“We are about growing the next generation of health care professionals right here at home, where kids can see themselves in these roles and it doesn't feel so foreign,” Leah Gagnon said.
Gagnon is the director for Inspire Health Foundation, a subsidiary of the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas that focuses on education.
Rural Kansas facilities, like many across rural America, struggle to fill positions for primary care or specialty doctors. Initiatives like this camp are trying to solve that by building a pipeline for rural kids to careers in rural health.
Camps to careers
The spring break camps are for kids kindergarten through sixth grade. Gagnon said they focus on introducing children to careers in mental health, dental hygiene, primary care, pharmacy and sports medicine — jobs that can be hard to fill in rural communities.
The kids do fun activities, like polishing teeth with a dental hygienist, going for a hike and practicing a grounding exercise with a behavioral health specialist, playing “candy or medicine” with pharmacists and taking ultrasounds with a sports medicine physician.
Gagnon said the goal is to have fun connecting kids to adults, but also show the children the types of health care jobs that exist in their community. These are jobs they otherwise might not be aware of, and the knowledge can hopefully inspire them to find a career in the medical field later in life.
Much of southeast Kansas is rural. Gagnon said residents have a hard time accessing specialists. For example, the area doesn’t have a urologist.
“You talk to any families in our communities and they're all going to tell you how often, for specialty services, they're going to an urban community to receive those services,” she said.
Another issue is that many of the physicians in their area are at or above retirement age and not enough students are going to medical school to take their place.
Jason Wesco is president and chief strategy officer for the health center. He said much of southeast Kansas is impoverished, and kids often don’t know they have health care options for a career.
“A lot of our kids in our part of the world don't always get asked what they want to be when they grow up,” Wesco said. “Our goal is to take our health care professionals and some from the community, put them in front of kids, have a little bit of fun, but also talk about what it means to be a health care professional.”
Wesco said they don’t stop at educational opportunities for little kids. The Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas also partners with the University of Kansas Medical Center’s Salina campus, Fort Scott Community College and Pittsburg State University.
“What we're trying to do is help them see that pathway and then walk alongside them until they realize their dreams,” he said.
Kansas workforce challenges
Tom Mueller is director of the Kansas Center for Rural Health at the University of Kansas Medical Center. The center’s goal is to reduce health disparities in rural Kansas and improve the health care workforce.
Mueller said it’s difficult to put numbers to specific health care workforce shortages in Kansas. The Kansas Center for Rural Health is currently working on a robust assessment of what specialty care looks like for rural Kansans.
“There are shortages really particularly as it relates to most specialties and sub specialties in rural Kansas,” he said. “We do continue to struggle and kind of want to get more primary care out there as well.”
While more work needs to be done on documenting physician shortages, Mueller said there is good data on specific jobs. The Kansas Nursing Workforce Center from KU, for example, publishes reports on the state of nursing and nursing education. According to an advanced 2026 report for the Kansas Legislature, Kansans’ need for nursing care is increasing as the population ages, but there aren’t enough nurses to keep up.
The report found that as of 2024, there was one registered nurse per 56 Kansans and one licensed practical nurse for every 322 Kansans.
“Despite the increasing need, the ratio of RNs and LPNs to Kansans has not grown in the last 10 years,” the report said. “It is especially concerning that the ratio of LPNs available to care for Kansans has markedly decreased during this time.”
KU’s School of Nursing also releases a report chronicling maternity care access in the state.
Data from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration projects that by 2038, the nation will have a shortage of 70,000 primary care physicians. This shortage will be most acute in rural areas.
Mueller said these challenges are complicated and often the reason for the shortage is specific to each profession. He said in primary care, for example, people often leave their communities and go to urban areas for schooling.
“Then they have a hard time seeing how what they've been trained to do can really happen in some of these smaller rural hospitals,” Mueller said. “There's also a stigma against working in rural (settings). There's also issues of people thinking they can't do their specialty in a rural setting.”
KU is working on breaking these barriers down and changing the narrative of rural health care. Mueller said the university has a lot of initiatives focused on bolstering the health workforce in rural communities, like the Kansas Medical Student Loan program, which helps cover tuition costs for primary care or psychiatry students who agree to work in Kansas after graduating.
“We're going to try and focus on developing a pipeline where people come from rural Kansas, get their training and then come back,” he said.
Mueller said KU also helps facilitate a club for high and middle schoolers who plan on going into the medical field and college students enrolled in health science programs. The club is called HOSA. He said the program has seen a lot of growth in recent years and more schools are starting chapters.
Although Kansas faces challenges in rural health care, Mueller said he’s hopeful.
“I think there's a lot of attention on this, and there's a lot of people thinking about this,” he said. “Even though we do have hospitals that get classified as at risk of closure, there are a lot of people in the state working on these topics.”
Hope back at camp
Back at the kid’s camp in Pittsburg, some of the participants, like 6-year-old Nora, found career inspiration.
“I want to be a doctor,” she said. “Because I can save people.”
Jeremiah, who is 7, learned about how his body works. And 6-year-old Stella just had fun.
“My momma signed me up for this,” she said. “It was pretty cool.”
Gagnon, who helps facilitate the camp, said for some of these kids, it may be a little too early for them to decide on a career. But maybe memories from the camp could influence them in the future.
“They want to be a princess or an astronaut or a cowboy,” she said. “I think it's just important for them to be thinking and seeing themselves in the future, and if health care is in that sphere somewhere.”
Gagnon said to reach more kids, in addition to the spring break camp, the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas offers the camp again in the summer, and also hosts a more in-depth camp for middle and high school students interested in health care careers.
The Kansas News Service is a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio.
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