In the basement of UC San Diego's Jacob Medical Center, Mae Valdehueza props open a door to a secure medical facility. She’s in full scrubs.
Inside is a bright white room with a few people moving medical equipment.
“Those carts are usually filled with trays and containers that have all the instruments in it — the knives, the scissors, the retractors, the forceps — everything,” the 39-year-old said.
She’s describing the first step of her work as a Sterile Processing Technician.
It's a job where she ensures thousands of medical instruments are meticulously cleaned and decontaminated, then assembled, sanitized and finally organized and stored.
“When you talk about surgeries you think about doctors, nurses, scrub techs, but before they start their surgeries they have to have their equipment,” Valdehueza said.
This is a role that’s relatively new to her thanks to a special training program.
She worked in housekeeping at the organization for the past eight years and was looking for a change.
“I want to go back to school and stuff like that, but there's no time for it,” she said. “Because first I'm a mom, I got to keep food and the roof over the head of my kids. And I was the breadwinner for a long time. So I got to choose between going to school or working.”
Valdehueza found something that let her do both.
She was part of the first cohort of UC San Diego Health’s sterile processing technician program, which graduated 10 people earlier this year.
They had dozens of applications.
“So it's 18 weeks — seven weeks at Southwestern College so classroom training … and then 11 weeks of clinical training at UCSD Health and that was paid training,” said the organization’s Monica Redmond.
She said the program trains current janitors, housekeepers and food service workers for new jobs in the clinical field.
“We saw we had a high number of vacancies in our sterile processing tech department and frankly a lack of qualified applicants,” Redmond said.
The program gives UC San Diego Health a wide range of skilled workers to fill those job openings.
As for the employees, they get paid to learn a new career.
“You can skip work and they'll pay you to go to school and learn about this program, so I was like it's a win-win,” Valdehueza said.
She said the program has opened doors for further job advancement.
“When we got here it opened up a lot of possibilities for us. So that's probably the biggest advantage I would say, but we also moved up a little on pay, on income so I'm pretty happy about that,” Valdehueza said.
The program is a partnership between UC San Diego Health and JVS Bay Area, a workforce development nonprofit.
It’s funded through a mixture of state and private dollars.
“We’re targeting incumbent workers, so folks who are already employees of UCSD but who are in these jobs that don't have pathways for growth,” said JVS Bay Area’s CEO Lisa Countryman-Quiroz.
She said programs like this one are meant for the many Californians who are in low wage jobs and may have trouble paying for basic expenses.
“Our focus is to help people who don't have four year degrees or other kinds of certificates,” Countryman-Quiroz said.
Jesus Delgado is another graduate from the first cohort.
He also worked in housekeeping at UC San Diego Health and said there were some similarities in his previous role to being a sterile processing technician.
“I was working in the (operating room) turning over the room before each surgery and getting it ready for the next surgery to follow,” Delgado said.
While the training took place at the La Jolla campus, Delgado now works at UC San Diego’s medical center in Hillcrest.
He said the new role has reduced the number of hours he works each week from 60 or 70 to a more standard 40.
“More importantly, I can attend all my kids' sporting events. And they can see the change as well, they're even happier,” Delgado said. “Because I'm able to attend their practices or games more often rather than having to FaceTime their game or something.”
The program has already selected its next 10 applicants for its second cohort, which is set to kick off in January 2026.
UC San Diego Health’s Redmon said as long as the funding is there for the program, it will continue with the potential to expand to other clinical roles.
