LAKELAND, Fla. — Lakeland Regional Health is hosting a weekly job fair called Walk-in Wednesday, and there are various positions the hospital is aggressively recruiting for.
“Includes our registered nurses, our respiratory therapist. We have a position within the medical center called patient care assistant, patient care associate,” said Scott Dimmick, Lakeland Regional Health Chief Human Resources Officer.
This comes at a time when hospitals across the country are facing a nursing shortage.
“We have nurses aging out and retiring from the workforce and then COVID kind of exacerbated some of that. So, we are in a very good position staffing-wise, but obviously, everyone’s kind of feeling the strain,” said April Novotny, Chief Nurse Executive.
While Lakeland Regional is not short-staffed, the chief nurse executive said they are preparing for a winter influx and a new wave of COVID-19 infections.
“Trying to be proactive to make sure that we have as many of these resources as we need and nurses as we need to shore up our healthcare workforce, so we can prepare for winter, for COVID or whatever else hits,” said Novotny.
Lakeland Regional is currently seeing an alarming uptick in COVID-19 cases. There are currently 179 patients hospitalized with the virus.
“Almost all of the patients that are being admitted now are unvaccinated patients, but the Delta variant is very infectious and has definitely created a lot more demand for healthcare services in our community,” Novotny said.
