During this winter, students attending the Ross Medical Education Center Morgantown, West Virginia campus collected blankets for WVU’s Cancer Institute. The blankets will be distributed to patients during chemotherapy to provide warmth and comfort. For more than 30 years, the physicians, scientists, and staff of the WVU Cancer Institute have led the fight against cancer across West Virginia and established a national reputation for excellence.
The cancer services of WVU Medicine are provided to a variety of West Virginia cities like Morgantown, Fairmont, Parkersburg, and Martinsburg, in addition to Oakland, Maryland. This outstanding organization has been able to positively impact the lives of thousands of patients annually through their locations and their efforts.
WVU Medicine is an active partner with Ross Medical in Morgantown by hosting Medical Assistant program externs and hiring graduates as well as participating on Ross Advisory’ Board. WVU Medicine has hosted nearly 60 externs since the campus opened in 2012, and Stephanie Fragale, Clinical Preceptor with the Cancer Center, has supervised almost half of them. Tiffany Jones, Career Development Representative, boosts that the Cancer Center is her most requested externship site. “The Cancer Center is always expanding and in search of new medical assistants. Because the hiring process consists of three levels of interviews and extensive background and reference check, it can often take a few months to have a new employee begin. Thanks to our partnership with the Cancer Center, many potential candidates can move through the process faster as the staff is already familiar with the extern and the quality of their work.”
It was because of the strength of this partnership and the organization’s positive impact on the community that the current group of externs was proud to deliver the blankets collected this fall. “That was so nice of the students to collect the blankets,” Fragale commented. Externs delivered the nearly 40 blankets in December during a field trip to the Cancer Center.