Intern Aaron's Time at Larue Carter Memorial Hospital

Hello again everyone.  For the past two weeks of my internship I have been working at Larue D. Carter Memorial Hospital.  It has been a fast two weeks full of many great experiences.  My time at Larue has been a different experience for me than in most places in the State of Indiana.  Larue Carter is a mental health facility, and it took a little adjusting to get used to the fact that there would sometimes be patients out and about.  Working at Larue also brought some new rules that I didn't have in other areas of the State of Indiana.  The majority of these rules followed common sense.

While working at Larue Carter, I got the opportunity to work on several different tasks.  I sorted through medical files looking for TB test sheets, looked up how much experience nurses had and put that information into a spreadsheet, worked some with succession planning, and I got to log some worker’s comp claims using Larue Carter’s intranet.  Working with succession planning was something that I had done previously in my time at Department of Natural Resources.  What I did here at Larue was similar; I found out which employees are eligible to retire and composed a document detailing how many people are eligible for retirement and what positions are held by retirement eligible employees.

One major project I worked on was making postcards to send to graduating nurses.  The goal of these postcards is to be one of the first hospitals to offer congratulations to nurses as they get their license.  Being one of the first hospitals to offer congratulations and building that personal connection to new nurses will hopefully attract great new talent for Larue Carter as they continue their search for nurses to work here.

I also got the chance to sit in and evaluate new employee orientations here at Larue Carter, critiquing the orientation and trying to find ways in which to improve new employee orientation.  Two days of my time here I got to go out to colleges in the area and sit in as one member of the HR staff here at Larue gave nursing students information about Larue Carter.  I even got to sit in on some quick (ten to fifteen minute) interviews with some newly graduated nurses.

Next week is going to be my final week of my internship with the State Personnel Department.  I will be returning to the SPD headquarters at the Government Center for my final week.  This internship has been a great experience for me and has offered everything I could hope for out of an internship.