LincolnHealth President and CEO Cindy Wade said despite a deep staffing shortage, permanent closure for St. Andrews Village’s Zimmerli Pavilion is not on the table. It has been closed nearly a month; its few patients and remaining staff have been moved to the long-term care unit, Gregory Wing. Rumors of all sorts continue to make the rounds, she said.

“I don't think it's any surprise to anybody, but staffing across the country, in this state and for us has been challenging. Every business is challenged with staffing.”

Wade said St. Andrews Village is down eight nurses and five certified nurses’ assistants (CNAs), so reopening Zimmerli Pavilion will depend on when those staffing needs get met.

LincolnHealth spokesman John Martins said, “What we want people to recognize is there are no plans for Zimmerli Wing to be permanently closed. We dealt with that when we suspended the Urgent Care Center. People were saying 'They're going to close forever.' We're back there now because we can be. That's our hope with Zimmerli, that we get back there as soon as we can be.”

St. Andrews Urgent Care Center was closed Dec. 4, 2020 to May 19, 2021 due to the increased need for testing and respiratory unit manpower on the Miles campus in Damariscotta.

Staffing was always going to be a problem, with or without the pandemic, Wade said. So LincolnHealth has tried to get creative in attracting professionals to the area and encouraging Midcoast Mainers to go into nursing and other needed fields.

“The challenge there has been … that the nursing schools in the state have a limited capacity of how many students they can take into their programs mostly because of the lack of faculty to provide the oversight and to teach and to be on the unit so we have nurses and students in the hospital training and to have a certain ratio.”

Wade said LincolnHealth is having its nurses help provide the on-the-job training for nursing school programs to get students the experience they need on the unit.

Housing is “our number one issue right now,” Wade said. “It's almost impossible to recruit someone from this area right now because of housing. We've had several declinations from people accepting job offers and looking for a house or place to rent before they move and can't find it anywhere in the range of what they can afford. It is challenging.”