Hazard ARH announces career fair, seeks local job applicants

Hazard ARH Regional Medical Center will host a career fair Thursday, June 25, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 100 Medical Center Drive in Hazard, giving Perry County residents a direct shot at hospital work without leaving town. The event lands at a time when health care remains one of the region’s biggest employers and one of the few paths to stable local work for people who want to stay close to family, school and existing care networks.

Hazard ARH says the medical center was established in 1956 and is a 358-bed acute care hospital that primarily serves Perry, Knott, Fletcher, Leslie, Harlan, Bell, Knox, Clay, Owsley and Breathitt counties. The adjacent Hazard ARH Psychiatric Center serves as the acute mental health facility for a 21-county region in Kentucky, underscoring how much of the area’s medical system is tied to the Hazard campus and the people who staff it.

The hospital sits inside Appalachian Regional Healthcare, a not-for-profit system that says it operates 14 hospitals in Kentucky and West Virginia, employs around 6,700 people and generates $474 million in annual payroll and benefits into local economies. That makes a hiring event at Hazard ARH more than a routine job posting. In a county where wages, transportation and access to care are tightly linked, a hospital recruiting day can be a practical entry point into one of the largest employment pipelines in southeastern Kentucky.

The need is reflected in ARH’s own community health data. In the 2025-2027 Hazard Community Health Needs Assessment, the system said that from January 2022 through September 2024, 45.4% of inpatient discharges at Hazard ARH were Perry County residents, with another 11.8% from Knott County. Those numbers show how heavily local families rely on the hospital, not just for emergency care and inpatient treatment, but also for the jobs that keep the operation running.

The career fair also comes as ARH expands workforce development efforts. The system recently announced a registered apprenticeship program with Hazard Community & Technical College and the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program, and it plans to open an Allied Health Training Academy inside the Hazard ARH Medical Mall, with classes expected to begin in early 2026. Together, those moves suggest the June 25 hiring event is part of a longer push to build a local health-care labor pipeline and keep more medical careers rooted in Perry County.