(Spirit Lake)– If you’re a high school or college student interested in making healthcare a career, Lakes Regional Healthcare will again be offering a program this summer you may be interested in. LRH Vice President of Marketing and Retail Services Jennifer Gustafson says they’ll be holding their Summer Junior Volunteer Program June 2nd through July 25th…
“What they do is they apply to either work as an ER Junior Volunteer or a Surgery Junior Volunteer, or both, and then they can basically have firsthand knowledge caring for patients. They assist physicians, nurses, and other professional staff such as imaging and lab staff, and they work directly with patients helping those staff. They might clean rooms which is not quite so fun, but they basically have firsthand experience on what it means to care for patients in the healthcare setting.”
Gustafson says there is a cap on the number of students they can accept…
“Surgery junior volunteers we can only accept five because we have one shift from 7:30 am until 11:30 Monday through Friday so we just have five students that can have that, but then the ER junior volunteers, they can literally volunteer around the clock, 24-7 depending on their age and so we can accept up to 25 junior volunteers that will be in the ER.”
The application deadline is coming up in April…
“We need to get all of our applications in by April 18th and what that involves is basically completing an application that can be found on our website at lakeshealth.org/volunteer and also if they’re going to be under 18 when they do volunteer, so if they’re going to be 16 or 17 this summer, they need to also have a parental consent signed and that also is on the website.”
Gustafson adds the program is a win-win for both the students and the hospital…
“We have actually hired a number of our junior volunteers as they become nurses, in particular, and like in surgery, ER, Med Surge, we’ve hired a number of them and we also have had a number of our junior volunteers that are in medical school come do rotations with us as well and we are even possibly going to have one of our junior volunteers hopefully come back and be a physician here in the future as well.”
This will mark the 9th year for the Summer Junior Volunteer program at Lakes Regional Healthcare. Click here to sign up and for more information.
