This Texas high school is teaching healthcare in a realistic hospital setting

While staffing shortages are certainly nothing new to the industry, the healthcare workforce still has an estimated physician shortage of 141,160 expected through 2038 as of December 2025, per the federal Health Resources and Services Administration.

The industry is certainly working toward solutions, often offering higher wages to attract workers, but certain employers are also thinking outside the box. Houston-based Memorial Hermann Health System is getting creative about hiring by building a realistic hospital inside a nearby high school.

On Aug. 12, 2024, Health Education and Learning (HEAL) High School welcomed its first class of students. And by 2028, it’s expected to serve a student body of 760 high schoolers in an effort to inspire them toward a healthcare career, according to the system’s website.

“What we’re doing is really opening up healthcare as a career to our communities,” Bryan Sisk, SVP and chief nursing executive at Memorial Hermann, told Healthcare Brew.

In session. Funded by a $31 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, HEAL is modeled after Memorial Hermann, Sisk said. It has four patient care rooms (two medical surgical and two intensive care unit rooms), an imaging suite with a working X-ray machine, a pharmacy, a nurses’ station, and a pneumatic tube system, which is used to move documents.

The charity announced in December 2024 a $250 million initiative to create new healthcare high schools in 10 communities around the country.

“When students step foot inside the mock hospital within the HEAL High School building, they’re essentially being transported into a realistic environment of what it looks like in our hospital spaces,” Caitlin McVey Weinheimer, associate VP for the Memorial Hermann Institute for Nursing Excellence, told us.

Students practice on high-fidelity simulation mannequins, which allow them to hear heart and lung sounds, she added. Their simulations are also recorded to play back and review their work.

“Doing that in a simulated environment, then taking them to a facility that they’re familiar with already because the sites, the surroundings, the smells are very similar to what they saw in their simulated environment, really helps to decrease some of that anxiety” of starting a new job, Sisk said.

To get people interested in healthcare as a career, it’s best to start at a younger age, he added.

“Instead of just focusing on vacancies,” Sisk said the program is looking at how to “position ourselves for the long haul, to create a steady pipeline so that we’re ready to move with the market no matter what.”