Grace Melbuer, center, is seen at the United States Capitol building where she and other state leaders members met with Congressional representatives and staff.
Ridgefield student Grace Melbuer is not only working toward her dream of working in health care, she is also making it easier for others to pursue theirs.
When Melbuer was a freshman, she founded the Ridgefield High School chapter of Future Health Professionals (HOSA). At its start, the club had seven members. Over the years, it has flourished to include 30 members under Melbuer’s leadership.
“Our biomedical science program required that we have a leadership group called HOSA,” Ridgefield High School science teacher Shannon Hemrich said in a news release. “Grace really got the club off the ground.”
HOSA, formerly known as Health Occupations Students of America, is an international career and technical student organization with the primary mission to “help students become future leaders in health care.”
Under Melbuer’s leadership, students in the program started a job shadowing program with PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center and invited health care professionals to speak about the industry at their meetings.
As a part of HOSA leadership training, the program hosts annual competitive events. At last year’s state competition, Ridgefield’s HOSA team won multiple honors and Melbuer won first place in the Healthcare Issues exam, which tests competitors on currents events in healthcare.
Winning first place at the state competition gave Melbuer automatic entrance to the international competition where she competed against students from all over the United States, Canada, Mexico and China. When the results were announced, Melbuer found she placed 10th worldwide.
“I was expecting there to be a good amount of people in my competition,” Melbuer said in the release. “But I’m from Ridgefield, so the biggest testing environment I’ve had is, like, 30 kids. So walking into a room with 650 kids is kind of weird and overwhelming.”
Melbuer was also elected regional vice president and is one of the six representatives from Washington state. As a state officer, she traveled to Washington D.C. for the Washington Leadership Academy. There, she had the opportunity to meet with members of Congress and staff to advocate for career and technical service organizations and provide a student perspective on the health care industry.
As the 2019-20 school year is Melbuer’s senior year, she plans for other members to take over leadership of the organization she founded.
“That has been my main goal this year,” she said in the release. “We wanted to make sure HOSA remains strong.”
