Dream job brings healthcare professional back home

November 1, 2023

Lauren Boyd has always been an active person and is always looking for ways to give back.

After attending Dalhousie University for four years, the 23-year-old landed her dream job as a radiological technologist at the Inverness Consolidated Memorial Hospital.

She’s been at the job for over a year, working in diagnostic imaging, doing x-rays, CAT scans and EKGs.

Since she was young, she was interested in healthcare and working with people. She said the impact her job has on people is rewarding.

“I like mostly knowing that you can make a difference in somebody’s day,” Boyd told The Participaper in an interview.

“Even if it’s only a short 15-minute scan. You can tell when you brighten somebody’s day a little bit.”

And working near her hometown of Glendale is an added perk.

“It’s definitely the kind of pace that I like, like being back home with all my family and friends and being in the woods and having the beach five minutes down the road,” she said. “It’s nice to have that break from the city after four long years.”

It can be challenging to work with people on some of the most difficult days of their lives, she said, especially because she is closely connected to the community and feels pain alongside her patients.

“But it’s just one of those things. You kinda have to be able to separate yourself from it,” she said.

She said she navigates the ups and downs of the job by maintaining a mindset that focuses on doing good for people in hard times.

The team at the hospital in Inverness, she said, has been welcoming and admirable examples in the profession.

“It’s rural but also busy enough, so every day is different, and you see so much,” she explained. “But it’s still small enough that you know who you’re working with, and you know your patients pretty well and there’s such a stronger sense of community than you get at a larger hospital.”

After spending summers throughout high school and university working as a lifeguard in Inverness County, the area drew her back. The village of Inverness is a home away from home for her.

“I knew that there was a good crew that worked here, and it was just an enticing small little hospital, a good place to get all my bearings and start working and find my independence in the job that I have,” she said.

The community has also been welcoming, she added, although it was a struggle to find housing. She plans to soon move from Glendale to Inverness.

“Everybody’s always on my side. When I was looking for a place, it seemed like everybody in Inverness was trying to find me places to live, even patients were coming in and saying ‘Oh, you need a spot? I heard this person knows this person who knows this place.’”

Still in her early twenties, she said she has a lot of time to make moves in her career.

“But currently, I’m just focused on being more involved in the community,” she said.

Creating opportunities around recreational sports for people is a passion of hers and it’s one way she plans to involve herself in the community more.

Currently she’s working with a program called Girls on Boards, a nonprofit organization that empowers girls to love their bodies, trust themselves and get involved in water sports.

The program is important to Boyd because girls don’t typically get the same exposure to sports as boys, she said.

“I want to encourage girls to get out and find confidence in themselves with new sports that they never experienced before,” she said.

“We’re just going to try to bring board sports to the rural areas and have girls introduced into different sports that they wouldn’t have normally had the exposure to.”

The program works with girls ages eight to 18 with additional sessions for women.

“We’re hoping to do some skateboarding and surfing and throw other board sports amongst paddleboarding,” she said.

Boyd’s plans include learning more about her work, getting to know the community further and continuing to provide care for her patients with a smile in hopes she can help brighten their days.