Northern Michigan students explore healthcare careers at GVSU center
Northern Michigan students practiced CPR and anatomy skills at GVSU’s Traverse City center as leaders push to build a homegrown healthcare workforce.
High school students from Northern Michigan spent time at Grand Valley State University’s Traverse City Regional Center practicing CPR, using anatomy tools and working with healthcare technology, a hands-on effort aimed at keeping more future caregivers in the region.
The program, called Hands-On Health: Rural Student Engagement in Health Sciences, was supported by Impact 30 and designed to widen access to healthcare education and career exploration for rural and charter school students. GVSU says the point is not just to introduce young people to medicine, but to show them the range of careers that can keep local hospitals, clinics and long-term care providers staffed, from nursing and allied health to health information management and physician assistant work. The university’s career materials say there are more than 500 healthcare professions.
That workforce angle matters in Grand Traverse County and across Northern Michigan, where employers have long depended on a narrow pipeline of nurses, technicians and other specialists willing to train here and stay here. GVSU says its College of Health Professions has spent more than two decades expanding to meet workforce demands and healthcare needs, and the university points to clinical partnerships with seven health care systems and numerous private clinics in Northern Michigan as part of that effort.
The Traverse City Regional Center has served northwest lower Michigan for more than 20 years. It was established in 1995 as a charter member of Northwestern Michigan College’s University Center and moved in fall 2025 to the James Beckett Building on Northwestern Michigan College’s Front Street Campus. GVSU says the location offers undergraduate programs in Allied Health Sciences, Integrative Studies, Nursing and Health Information Management, along with graduate programs in Physician Assistant Studies, Public Health and Occupational Therapy.
That local footprint is part of the strategy. Grand Valley has also moved to connect high school students more directly to college credit and career pathways, including an April 5 agreement with Northwest Education Services that lets students in the Health Sciences program at North Ed Career Tech earn college-level credits through GVSU. For a region that needs more hard-to-fill healthcare workers, the question is whether those early experiences, credits and clinical ties can turn local students into local graduates, and local graduates into local employees.
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