By Kevin J. Sabo
For the Castor Advance
Castor’s Our Lady of the Rosary Hospital has a new site administrator.
Lora Maygard started her new role in the facility the week of May 17th. She may be new to Castor, but she is a long-tenured member of Covenant Health, who operates the facility.
“My background is actually as a pharmacist,” said Maygard.
“I’ve worked for Covenant Health for nearly 25 years. It will be 25 in July.”
Maygard’s previous role with Covenant was at the corporate level, where she worked across all the Covenant Health sites in the province.
“Over the last few years, I was doing a corporate role, with medication safety,” said Maygard.
“It was a medication safety team within Covenant Health.”
As for the change to come rural, Maygard says that it is because of the respect she has for rural facilities.
“I had the opportunity to work across the entire province, and really got to see a lot of rural hospitals, and learned more about them,” said Maygard.
“I was really intrigued with the sense of community the rural hospital groups seemed to have, and the resilience of the workers at these sites, and their creativity to do these jobs with less resources available. I just had this sense of respect for them.”
As for why Castor specifically, that can be linked to a former employee Maygard had working within Covenant.
“One of my managers in the past, many years ago, she was a manager for me, she ended up moving back to Castor and leaving her job with me,” said Maygard.
“I remembered her stories about the community here, and I thought that it would be a very welcoming community to be part of, and I have found that so far.”
The hospital administrator role in Castor is a split position, with Maygard administrating both the Castor site and the Killam Health Centre. She’s been settling into her role at each site, but she says it is a definite “learning curve.”
“There’s a learning curve,” said Maygard.
“I’m learning the names of the staff and the residents. It’s been great so far; people have been so welcoming and friendly.”
Aside from getting herself up to speed at both sites, Maygard will be guiding the facility through the upcoming transition to ConnectCare, which will link the Castor facility to a province-wide health network, allowing better communication between health care providers across the province. In addition to that, Castor will be undergoing an Accreditation Canada survey in the fall.
Maygard will be working in her Castor office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, as well as alternating Wednesdays.