Helping to ‘send cancer packing’
The GFWC Lutz-Land O’ Lakes Woman’s Club recently participated in the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life at a local high school campus, joining many other school groups and organizations for the fundraising event. The women set up a booth with the theme ‘Send Cancer Packing,’ with props and games with prizes, to help raise money. For information on the woman’s club, visit GFWCLutzLandOLakesWomansClub.org or its Facebook page.
Hospital names president
Sara Dodds is the new president of St. Joseph’s Hospital-North, 4211 Van Dyke Road in Lutz. Her appointment was effective April 16, according to a news release.
Dodds, the hospital’s operations director, had been serving as interim president since Jan. 2, the latest in a long line of steps she has made in building a career at BayCare, the release said.
She succeeds Tom Garthwaite, president of BayCare’s Winter Haven Hospital and Winter Haven Women’s Hospital. St. Joseph’s Hospital-North will begin a search for a new operations director.
Dodds has been in a leadership position at St. Joseph’s Hospital-North since 2016 when she led clinical decision support. In 2017, she became operations director overseeing areas that include quality of patient care and finance. She has a reputation for working closely with all departments, a particularly important trait as she led the hospital’s $76-million expansion completed in 2020, which doubled the hospital’s beds to more than 200 and increased services, the release said.
More recently, she’s had a leading role in the addition of a 24-bed inpatient psychiatric unit at the hospital. The Unit for Psychiatry and Medical Services (UPM) simultaneously treats patients for both medical and psychiatric diagnoses and opened this month.
Dodds has been with BayCare since 2004 when she started at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Tampa as a patient care technician while attending nursing school.
She is a 2021 graduate of the Leadership Tampa program of the Tampa Bay Chamber and a board member of The Florida Orchestra and FiCare Credit Union. Dodds also is a member of the Philanthropic Women of St. Joseph’s Hospitals.
In 2021, she was named to Tampa Bay Business Journal’s “40 Under 40” list honoring 40 young professionals in the local area under the age of 40.
