From March 2–4, the Camas High School (CHS) Health Occupation Students of America (HOSA) chapter attended a HOSA State Leadership Conference (SLC) at the Washington State University (WSU) Spokane campus. Six delegate students — Sujatha Chutkay, Narayan Chutkay, Evy Combe, Channing Doepkin, Aurora Patel, and Liya Zhao — attended and competed at the WSU Spokane conference.
HOSA is an international student-led organization that prepares high school and college students for careers in the healthcare industry, founded in 1976. It has over 350,000 members across 56 different chapters, not only in the United States, but in American Samoa, Canada, China, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Vietnam as well.
The CHS HOSA chapter was originally started in 2020, but due to the school’s budget cuts, the club faced difficulties to expand further and was eventually shut down.
President Sujatha Chutkay, along with the club advisor Sree Muthiah, restarted the club at the beginning of the 2025–26 school year. It grew to include 22 members over the next six months.
“What I want is to bring students to new and upcoming things in healthcare,” Muthiah said. “CHS has a great potential for [HOSA], and this is meant to be exposure to healthcare.”
After the club regained its footing, the next step was to attend a conference to be recognized as an official competitor.
The HOSA organization hosts SLCs throughout the United States, which provides opportunities for students to reach out to medical professionals and experience what being in the biomedical field is like. Students visit workshops to gain hands-on practice with learning various medical operations and compete in events to test their knowledge.
At each workshop, a different medical professional teaches students how to operate a medical procedure using a dummy patient. Some of the workshops that the CHS HOSA delegates attended included an intubation lab, a cow eye dissection, a diabetes lab, and a Stop the Bleed training.
“One of the workshops I went to was a suture shop where you got to actually do a suture on a fake replica of skin,” vice president Narayan Chutkay said. “[There were] very experienced professionals that came there and showed us how to do stuff.”
The SLC competitive events test students’ knowledge about the biomedical field by performing operations on dummy patients, taking written tests, debating with other students, and competing in the HOSA Bowl in front of judges.
“We got to compete for the HOSA Bowl, which we were really close to placing in the top three, but sadly we didn’t,” president Sujatha Chutkay said. “This year we could only participate in one event [as a team], but next year, hopefully we can participate in more.”
CHS HOSA delegates achieved top 10 in several events at the conference. Narayan Chutkay placed fourth and fifth in Human Heredity and Anatomy and Physiology respectively. Sujatha Chutkay, Narayan Chutkay, and Zhao together placed sixth in the Anatomage Tournament. Aurora Patel placed seventh in Environmental Health. The team also placed sixth in the HOSA Bowl.
Sujatha Chutkay and Narayan Chutkay both qualified for the International Leadership Conference, which will take place in June at Indianapolis.
The HOSA organization has made impacts on many students’ lives who have considered becoming medical professionals in their futures.
“[The SLC] helped me realize how each profession operates differently,” Combe said. “There were a bunch of different people going into different professions that were directing [the workshops], but they could all help because they all had similar goals.”
