ASHE pilot program links interns with education

A new program for career progression at the American Society for Health Care Engineering (ASHE) seeks to marry facilities management internship programs with ASHE’s vast educational resources. The program, which is just in a pilot stage, will supply interns with materials designed to complement the “in the trenches” experiences they are receiving.

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The first participant in the program was an intern at Banner Health in Phoenix. He received a package of ASHE resources on a wide range of topics to help him better understand the concepts he was learning on the job.

Tina Morton, ASHE’s director of member engagement, explains that the idea emerged when Banner Health reached out to ASHE because they recognized that ASHE has such a rich collection of resources that could help an intern. ASHE staff spent time assembling the right set of resources to match Banner Health’s internship program.

“It’s a combination of online resources, like our monographs, and then also online courses,” Morton says. “It starts out with introduction and overview, and then it goes through asset management and reliability; maintenance and operations; and planning, design and construction. You can think about it like any kind of college course, where you have different units. That’s kind of what this is.”

Morton adds that the program could potentially be tailored for other health care organizations that have internship programs, depending on what they are teaching the interns. In each case, ASHE would collaborate with the internship program organizers.

“Every internship program is going to have its own attributes and requirements, and ASHE can create a program that matches those,” she says. “We’re focused on being the gold standard resource for education on facilities management topics.” ν