Staff Spotlight

Certified Nursing Assistant Danielle Rushing had a job in Lompoc working with the elderly, but it just didn’t seem like the right fit for her. “I wanted to work somewhere I could enjoy,” she said.

In just a few years, Mariah Hall has already had a pretty extensive job history at Lompoc Valley Medical Center. Now a Licensed Vocational Nurse at the Comprehensive Care Center, she began considering healthcare as a career when she job shadowed Cardiologist Dr. Khawar Gul, thinking she wanted to learn that specialty as a career.

When the position of Perioperative Services manager became available at LVMC, Sarah Gunter at first didn’t think she’d be good for the job.

Just a few weeks into her job as LVMC’s new Nurse Educator, Karen Koppes is already creating plans for a new-graduate RN training program at the hospital.

As a licensed vocational nursing student at Santa Barbara Business College, Kaila Colvard was able to observe a quadruple bypass heart surgery. “This is what I need to be doing,” she recalls as she watched the operating room nurses doing their jobs.

While a student at Lompoc High School in the early 1980s, Shari Hurlbut took a course that allowed her to do clerical work at the school district, at Federal Electric Co. and at Lompoc hospital.

Jose Castellanos says his first “real job” was a food service worker at Lompoc’s Panda Express. The 23-year-old worked at the fast food establishment because the flexibility of hours was helpful when he was in high school and also cutting hair as a side job.

Emily Bertsch’s path to her career as a Family Nurse Practitioner is a convoluted one but is a journey that always had a central theme at its core: caring for others. Emily works alongside Dr. Donna Walker at Lompoc Valley Medical Center: Hematology-Oncology, helping treat more than 1,000 patients with varying forms of cancer.

Lompoc Valley Medical Center (LVMC) Dietary Technician Michelle Romero has held jobs in the food service industry for years, including stints at Yogurt Creations in Lompoc and El Rancho Market.

Years ago, Gina Devris took one of those ubiquitous personality/career tests about finding the best profession to suit her personality.
The results came back: doctor, psychiatrist or occupational therapist.

Something clicked for Nancy Sparkman in her second year of working as a registered nurse. At the end of her nursing school at Santa Barbara City College, she realized thatshe had made a good choice for her future. “This is exactly where I’m supposed to be,” she remembers thinking.

For the past 20 years, Eric Lykens has been on what he calls a “wonderful ride.” As an Information Systems department Senior Systems Analyst, Eric has watched the hospital’s computer capability grow from just a handful of computer servers to more than 100 physical and virtual servers and systems that have grown exponentially since he first arrived from his previous job at Vandenberg Air Force Base.