After seven years as a secretary in the psychiatry department at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y., India Rouault was “tired of pushing papers.” She also welcomed the prospect of earning more money.
James Mangum Jr. felt he was stagnating after nine years in Montefiore's nutrition department, doing jobs like preparing the trays of food sent to patients.
Rouault, 41, and Mangum, 28, are no longer in those jobs. Instead, they were in a classroom in Manhattan with 15 other Montefiore employees and a supine female mannequin that could be opened to reveal models of internal organs.
The group was attending a 10-month, full-time training course to become surgical technologists at the medical center.
Among other tasks, surgical technologists, also known as operating-room technicians, help prepare the operating room and the patient by laying out surgical instruments and other equipment, shaving and disinfecting the incision site, and positioning and covering the patient on the table. During the operation, they hand the instruments to the surgeon.
As with health-related occupations generally, surgical technology is expected to be a source of solid job growth in the coming decades as the post-World War II baby-boom generation ages and life spans continue to lengthen. That will increase the population of the elderly, who generally need more surgical procedures than younger people.
The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics has estimated that from 2004 to 2014, surgical technology jobs in the nation will increase by 30 percent, to nearly 110,000.
There are training courses at community colleges and vocational schools and in nondegree programs at universities. In addition, some hospitals, such as Montefiore, sponsor other programs to train employees working in less-skilled and lower-paying jobs to become operating room technicians.
“Since we started teaching a surgical technology course in 1998, about 15 hospitals in the city and Westchester County have sent their people to take it,” said Smyrna Clause, director of the Health Care Institute of the nonprofit Consortium for Worker Education, an organization sponsored by nearly 50 labor unions.
The group from Montefiore was among those taking the institute's course. It was the third class of Montefiore employees since 2002 to be groomed to become surgical technologists, and the second to be trained by the institute. The union at Montefiore, 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, has co-sponsored all three classes and helped pay for them, using government grants.
The first half of the course was being spent largely on learning anatomy, physiology and other topics at the union consortium's headquarters in Manhattan. The second half was spent mostly at Montefiore, where the students will ultimately assist, under supervision, in real operations.
While they were taking the course, they were paid $600 a week, which in some cases is less than they were earning in their former jobs. Mangum, from the nutrition department, for example, was making $100 a week more there.
“But to me, it's still a blessing,” he said of the course, which has no tuition or fees. “To get this training on my own would be very expensive.”
The starting salary of a surgical technologist at Montefiore is $44,000 a year, about $8,000 more than Mangum's old job paid. And he can get $4,000 more if he passes a voluntary national certification test. Rouault and Gonzalez, both single mothers, could get similar raises.
Mangum also was impressed by another number. “We were told there are over 200 kinds of surgical instruments,” he said.
