(Spirit Lake)– Lakes Regional Healthcare is gearing up for its Summer Junior Volunteer Program. Vice President of Marketing and Retail Services Jennifer Gustafson says they can apply to help out with physicians, nursing and other professional staff and patients, as well as the Emergency, Surgery and Inpatient departments in the hospital…
“In those departments they get to have hands-on experience working with patients, working with staff, with visitors, and it’s not a shadowing experience. I mean there will be some shadowing but mainly a hands-on thing, so they can do anything that they wouldn’t need any special education for. It’s something that really helps out our staff but it also helps students in understanding do they want to pursue a career in healthcare or not. We’ve found out that probably half of the students that go through the problem do want to pursue a career in healthcare and just are really energized by it, and the other half, you know, find out that you know what, I don’t know if healthcare is for me, and that’s fine because that usually happens before they invest a lot of time and money into education.”
Gustafson says they are now accepting applications for the coming summer…
“What they do is they fill out an application and it tells what their experience has been, what extra curricular activities have they been in, what other volunteer things have they done. They also get a reference from a guidance counselor or a professor and submit that with their application and then we interview every single applicant and we then, I mean most people get accepted just because of the numbers that we get but then they may or may not get accepted into the program depending on how many we can accept at that time. But yes, then they get interviewed and then they go through an orientation process similar to what our own staff goes through and then they start volunteering, and it’s one shift, one four-hour shift, every week for eight weeks throughout the summer.”
Applications and more information can be found at the Lakes Regional Healthcare website.
