Beaumont Greets 100 Children at 'Kids at Work Day'

A sign at Beaumont Hospital reads "Kids at Work" to warn visitors to be on the lookout for fun activities.

More than 100 children at schools from Troy to Oxford and areas in-between participated in Beaumont's Take Your Child To Work Day this morning.

This is the 20th anniversary of Take Our Daughters and Sons To Work Day—as it is officially called—which always lands on the fourth Thursday of April. The program was developed to help girls and boys explore the many life choices they have. 

At Beaumont Hospital in Troy, children could explore several activities from stitching a mock liver to drilling a spinal implant model, from watching a mock laparoscopic surgery to using a real Bovie cautery machine on fruit.

Nurse Anesthetist Karen Piper, who watched every activity with her eight-year-old daughter, Lola Piper, a second-grade student at Clear Lake Elementary School in Oxford, said that it was satisfying to bring some context to the regular dinner table conversation.

"(Lola) knows that I go to work every day, but it's nice that she can see what I do when I'm at work, too," Piper said. "Nobody ever did anything like this when we were growing up, so I think it's really cool to see that they get exposed to the hospital and what we do behind the scenes."