- Q&A: Angela Gonzales (Hopi), on New Indigenous Health Research Dashboard
- Not All Expectant Moms Can Reach a Doctor's Office. This Kentucky Clinic Travels to Them.
- Hawaiʻi's Physician Shortage Hits Maui Hardest
- Choctaw Nation Found a Better Way to Deliver Harm Reduction. It's Working.
- In Rural America, Heart Disease Is Increasingly Claiming Younger Lives
- HHS Launches Healthy Border 2030 Framework Highlighting Health Priorities and Actions to Support Border Communities and Populations
- Gaps in Mental Health Training, Rural Access to Care Compound Az's Maternal Mortality Crisis
- Enticing Rural Residents to Practice Where They Train
- New Round of Federal Funding Open for Rural Health Initiatives
- UAA Training for Health Care Providers Keeps Victims of Violent Crimes from Falling Through the Cracks
- Helene Exacerbated Rise in Homelessness Across Western North Carolina
- 'It's a Crisis': How the Shortage of Mental Health Counselors Is Affecting the Rural Northwest
- FCC Launches New Maternal Health Mapping Platform
- How Mobile Clinics Are Transforming Rural Health Access for Cochise County Farmworkers
- Struggling to Adapt
NRHA’s Rural Horizons | Spring 2020
Rural Pennsylvania: This Working Man Was Ready to Retire. But the Virus Took Him
HAZLETON, Pa. — Just off Wyoming Street in Pennsylvania’s hilly, working-class city of Hazleton, Laury Sorensen and her husband, Emil, lugged groceries from a pickup truck upstairs to her parents’ wood-frame home.
They sought to spare Ms. Sorensen’s father, Rafael Benjamin, a trip to the supermarket in a time of infectious plague. He ran enough risk working for Cargill Meat Solutions in an industrial park outside the city.
The Pennsylvania governor had issued a shutdown order but exempted Cargill, which packages meat in plastic wrap. Mr. Benjamin, a good-natured man who rarely missed a day of work, said colleagues labored shoulder to shoulder in March without masks and gloves, and he worried it had become a petri dish for sickness.
A few days later, Mr. Benjamin could not come to the phone. “He got sick on Tuesday,” his son-in-law texted. “He’s on a respirator.”
Then another text: “He was six days from retirement.”
This is the tale of the virus as it swept down Wyoming Street in a city of 25,000 tucked into the wooded, still-leafless foothills of the Poconos. Five days spent along a few blocks of old, worn rowhouses and storefronts revealed the virus to be all around. All anyone spoke about was the people falling ill.
‘It’s Gone Haywire’: When COVID-19 Arrived in Rural America
DAWSON, Ga. (AP) — The reverend approached the makeshift pulpit and asked the Lord to help him make some sense of the scene before him: two caskets, side by side, in a small-town cemetery busier now than ever before.
Rev. Willard O. Weston had already eulogized other neighbors lost to COVID-19, and he would do more. But this one stood as a symbol to him of all they had lost. The pair of caskets, one powder blue, one white and gold, contained a couple married 30 years who died two days apart, at separate hospitals hours from each other, unaware of the other’s fate.
The day was dark. There was no wind, not even a breeze. It felt to some like the earth had paused for this.
As the world’s attention was fi
xated on the horrors in Italy and New York City, the per capita death rates in counties in the impoverished southwest corner of Georgia climbed to among the worst in the country. The devastation here is a cautionary tale of what happens when the virus seeps into communities that have for generations remained on the losing end of the nation’s most intractable inequalities: these counties are rural, mostly African American and poor.
New Penn State COVID-19 Report on Essential Work
The Penn State Institute of State and Regional Affairs (ISRA) released today the second installment of the COVID-19 Report Series: Employment Risk, quantifying the extent of establishments and employment effected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the closure of non-essential businesses.
The report uses current definitions for essential businesses paired with data on establishments, employment, and unemployment claims to assess the economic impact of the pandemic in Pennsylvania.
The key findings include:
- At least 1.2 million employees worked in industries impacted by business establishment closures.
- Over the four-week period from March 21 through April 4, nearly 1.7 million unemployment claims were filed.
Click here to read the latest report from ISRA’s COVID-19 Report Series for additional details on trends at the sector and county levels.
Cybersecurity Toolkit for Rural Hospitals and Clinics
Ransomware and cybercrime are growing threats to all healthcare facilities, big or small. Protecting a facility from cyber threats can be a daunting task, however, failure to do so can result in fees, fines, litigation, media stories, mistrust, and decreased market capture.
The updated Rural Cybersecurity Toolkit was created by the National Rural Health Resource Center (The Center), and supported by the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy (FORHP). The toolkit is organized into four steps to guide rural hospitals and clinics in developing and fostering a well-rounded cybersecurity program; 1) Awareness, 2) Assessment, 3) Implementation and remediation, and 4) Education. The Toolkit also includes resources from various governmental and non-profit organizations, as well as tools and checklists appropriate for all hospitals and clinics in rural settings.
USDA Announces Additional Food Purchase Plans
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced details of $470 million in Section 32 food purchases to occur in the third quarter of fiscal year 2020, in addition to purchases previously announced, which will enable USDA to purchase surplus food for distribution to communities nationwide. These Section 32 purchases will provide additional support for producers and Americans in need, in response to changing market conditions caused by the COVID-19 national emergency.
Using these available funds, USDA plans to purchase 100 percent American-grown and produced agricultural products totaling $4.89 billion for the remainder of this fiscal year in support of American agriculture and people in need:
- Farmers to Families Food Box Program– $3 billion
- TEFAP – Additional $850 million
Support Program for Farmers- $573.6 million
COVID-19 Resources for Farmers & Ag Workers with Disabilities & Health Conditions
The National AgrAbility Project has for assembled a page of resources, referrals, and links related to COVD-19 to support the farmers, agricultural workers, and the professionals who are working with them during this pandemic. It is a great place to find specific information connected to the work of farmers with disabilities or health conditions.
Please share additional suggestions for this page to: agrability@agrability.org
Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act, Title V)
Last week, states received a minimum of $1.25 billion from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act, Title V) to use at their discretion to address issues related to the pandemic. These dollars may be used to fund necessary COVID-19-related expenses that have not been addressed in their most recently passed state budgets and are limited to expenses that occur between March 1 to Dec. 30, 2020.
To make funding decisions amid many competing priorities, states could benefit from a snapshot showing all federal coronavirus relief funds that have already been received by hospitals and their affiliates within their states. It remains unclear if and when the federal government will make such information available and whether that data will be by hospital.
The National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP), in consultation with state officials, has drafted a template that states can use or revise to seek timely information detailing which hospitals are already receiving federal coronavirus relief funds. The template seeks information about hospitals and their affiliates, which can include labs, physician practices, rural health and behavioral health clinics, surgery centers, and nursing homes.
Knocking Down the Barriers to Health Care for Rural Sexual Assault Victims
The Penn State College of Nursing’s SAFE-T Center team, led by assistant professor and center director Sheridan Miyamoto, is working to address barriers to health care for rural sexual-assault victims with their new telehealth solution, the SAFE-T System.
According to the center, there are more than 284,000 victims of sexual assault across America every year. Victims require timely, skilled, and compassionate health care to address injuries, risk of pregnancy, and sexually transmitted infections. Additionally, forensic evidence must be collected accurately and methodically to aid in the successful prosecution of perpetrators. Current technology used to aid in magnification, image capture, and secure storage is expensive and requires substantial technical expertise to administer.
Unfortunately, most U.S. hospitals lack both the adequate equipment to photo-document evidence of assault and the needed expert sexual assault health care providers; nor do they have access to peers who can review findings. In these underserved settings, providers either use hand-held cameras without magnification or forego photo-documentation completely, resulting in inadequate evidence for successful prosecution of perpetrators.
Currently, the SAFE-T Center pairs existing commercial products with custom telehealth solutions and extensive added security protections and deploys the technology suite to rural partner hospitals, enabling a local nurse and victim to receive assistance from an off-site expert, a sexual assault nurse examiner (teleSANE), in real time, as if the expert were present in the room. The technology also has the ability — with the patient’s consent — to enable the on-site nurse to talk with an on-screen forensic nurse, and together, they support the patient. The teleSANE can also see the live exam in progress to help see that compassionate, person-centered care is delivered and evidence collection adheres to best practices.
SAFE-T System — the next generation, improved visualization and telehealth device and platform — aims to provide better visualization of injuries and allow for enhanced security during these sensitive exams at a substantially reduced cost. Miyamoto said she believes that providing nurses with mentoring, live-guidance and advanced telehealth equipment will help provide sexual assault victims with enhanced confidence in their care, a first step toward healing.
Rural Matters Podcast: Rural Health during the Pandemic with NRHA’s Alan Morgan
In the most recent episode of Rural Matters, host Michelle Rathman chats with Alan Morgan, CEO of the National Rural Health Association, about the impact of COVID-19 on rural health.