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Girls Can summer campers pose in front of the Medical Center.
Childhood is augmented by the imagination and despite the fact 10 year-olds running Young AmeriTowne try on some grown-up responsibilities for the day, doesn’t mean they don’t enliven their day with some creativity. One shop where students really get the chance to role-play is the Medical Center.
Trips to the Medial Center
Armed with lab coats, child-sized scrubs and stethoscopes, the students working in the Medical Center can really feel the part while working hard to tackle a number of “sicknesses” plaguing the AmeriTowne population. The accountant quickly gets to work paying off the bills, because the earlier they finish, the sooner they can begin moonlighting as a medical professional. The health technicians deliver shop specific “safety-tips,” to each business before Towne opens for business, as a form of harm reduction. Once Towne opens the health techs take a wheelchair – the ambulance – to the shop listed on top of a “fate card” which lists the symptoms their patient is faced with. The patient is wheeled over to the Medical Center, were the health tech then takes down their age, weight, height and temperature.
All Medical Technicians run a series of tests for each “patient” coming through the Medical Center.
Meanwhile, the doctors will have inputting the patient’s symptoms into what I like to think of as the diagnosis wizard. Once these are entered, the wizard determines possible diagnoses; a cough may just be asthma, but paired with a fever and chest pain it could be pneumonia. The Medical Center website on the AmeriTowne intranet then allows the doctor to read up on these possible diseases and he or she then gets to decide on the final prognosis. Additionally, the doctors take down blood pressure and pulse readings for documentation (and of course, to fully understand the scope of the medical issue at hand!).
The financial aspect
Each patient pays a $2 co-pay, the cost of health care kept low thanks to insurance premiums each shop plays for their employees. It is one of the three spots in town where students practice writing personal checks – no other form of payment is accepted for the co-pay. The Medical Center also generates income through the sale of glow-in-the-dark sticky eyeballs, arguably the perfect pick-me-up after having “contracted” malaria or “experiencing” a heart-attack.
The Medical Center sells sticky eyeballs, among other things.
Sponsored by Rose Medical Center at our HQ location and Exempla Medical Center at Belmar, the shops are equipped with gadgets that authenticate the experience for AmeriTowne citizens, helping ensure everyone leaves our doors feeling 100%.
Teacher’s Tip
Have a student who loves moving around and feels comfortable approaching their peers but who might not know which AmeriTowne job suits them? Consider making them a health tech, reporter or the community relations director – these jobs can be both collaborative and independent, and the students who work them are tasked with walking around to do their jobs.
