The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) recently released the latest projections for the national supply, demand, and distribution of health care workers. Use the Workforce Projections Dashboard to explore supply and demand trends by occupation, state, year, and more. Additionally, check out Health Workforce Projections for an overview of projections for different groups of workers, such as nurses and physicians, and details on our programs that seek to address future shortages.
The Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use and leader of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), as well as the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), released a letter urging the public health and substance use disorder (SUD) treatment communities to increase the number of people with SUD who are tested and treated for HIV and viral hepatitis. Integrating HIV and viral hepatitis testing in SUD treatment settings improves treatment initiation, especially when treatment is co-located. This concept is in line with SAMHSA’s 2023–2026 Strategic Plan, which prioritizes the integration of behavioral and physical healthcare.
Andrea Deutsch, the mayor of Narberth, Pennsylvania, and the owner of a pet store in town, doesn’t get health care coverage through either of her jobs. Instead, she is enrolled in a plan she purchased on Pennie, Pennsylvania’s health insurance exchange. Deutsch, who has been mayor since 2018, is paid $1 per year for the job. Her annual income, from Spot’s – The Place for Paws and her investments, is about $50,000. The 57-year-old, who is diabetic, pays $638.38 per month for health care coverage — about half of the $1,272.38 she’d owe without the enhanced federal subsidies Congress and the Biden administration put in place in 2021. But that extra help is set to expire at the end of 2025. It would cost an estimated $335 billion over the next decade to extend it — a step the Republican-controlled Congress and the Trump administration are unlikely to take as they seek budget savings to offset potential tax cuts. States say they don’t have the money to replace the federal aid. In Pennsylvania, for example, doing so would take about $500 million per year, according to Devon Trolley, the executive director of the state’s exchange. The disappearance of the federal help would make coverage unaffordable for millions of Americans, including Deutsch. She said it would be a struggle to pay double what she is paying now. Read more.
The Rural Communities Opioid Response Program (RCORP) – Overdose Response is a one-year program supporting improved health care in rural areas by addressing their immediate and short-term needs related to the provision of substance use disorder services. RCORP – Overdose Response aims to reduce and prevent the risk of overdoses in rural areas.
The RCORP-Overdose Response Program will support specific, short-term substance use disorder prevention, treatment, and recovery activities, as well as work related to capacity building, supportive services, and special populations. Allowable activities are defined in the notice of funding opportunity.
Eligible organizations include all domestic public or private, non-profit, or for-profit entities.
FORHP will hold a webinar for applicants on Thursday January 30, 2025 at 3:00 pm Eastern. Log-information is below:
A technical assistance webinar via Zoom will be held for applicants on Thursday January 30, at 2:00 pm Eastern.
Approximately 20 awards of up to $300,000 each will be made. Apply by March 10, 2025.
For more information about this funding opportunity, contact the Program Coordinator, Diana Wang, at ruralopioidresponse@hrsa.gov.
Click here for additional information and the application package.
From Becker’s Financial Management
A Dec. 20 study published in JAMA from researchers at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University and Providence, R.I.-based Brown University has shed light on financial disparities between critical access hospitals and larger acute care hospitals.
The study looked at 2016 to 2022 financial data from more than 4,500 hospitals in the U.S., and provides financial health CAH insights and the impact that system affiliation has on their performance.
Here are six things to know:
All communities rely on physical spaces that are vital to the well-being of their citizens, such as grocery stores, recreational facilities and pharmacies. But what happens when these places are lost, especially in rural areas where no alternatives exist?
Two new studies led by researchers in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences and College of Health and Human Development — one published in the journal Wellbeing, Space and Society and the other in the Journal of Rural Health — analyzed the experiences of residents in one such rural Pennsylvania community after the closure of several of these essential places.
Closures included a grocery store, bank, hardware store, church, primary care clinic, pharmacy and two restaurants — some due to population loss and some as the result of the pandemic.
Both studies found that the loss of these spaces had well-being and social impacts. For example, the loss of the area’s only grocery store severely limited access to healthy food and decreased opportunities for social connection. Additionally, the loss of the area’s sole pharmacy and health care facility resulted in impacts on health, such as delays in seeking care and an over-reliance on local emergency medical services.
Kristina Brant, co-author on both papers and assistant professor of rural sociology, said the findings help showcase why the closures of community institutions — especially in rural areas — matter, and could help policymakers and practitioners find ways to improve and sustain well-being for these communities.
“While some people may be able to travel to the next town over to access services, this isn’t possible for everyone, so these closures could perpetuate inequalities between residents,” Brant said. “By documenting how communities are impacted by these closures, we can better show why helping communities preserve their institutions is important, while also considering strategies to help communities adapt and pivot when they do lose essential community institutions.”
In recent years, the researchers said, there has been population loss across much of rural America. Between 2010 and 2020, two-thirds of rural counties saw a decrease in their populations. And when populations decrease, community institutions can be threatened — it can be difficult to sustain businesses and organizations amid a declining number of community members.
Danielle Rhubart, first author of the paper in Wellbeing, Space and Society and assistant teaching professor of biobehavioral health, said it’s important to consider how a loss of these institutions can impact the community members who stay.
“A lot of the focus in previous research has been on the importance of these places in urban settings,” said Rhubart, who also co-authored the paper in the Journal of Rural Health. “We were interested in how the loss of these community institutions impacts rural community health and well-being.”
For both studies, the researchers interviewed 26 local residents. Questions were broad and open-ended, including ones about perceptions of the interviewees’ community. While the studies were limited to one area, the researchers said their findings could represent similar experiences in other rural locations across the United States.
In the paper led by Rhubart, the researchers examined how community members were affected by the loss of spaces not related to health care, such as grocery stores. In the paper in the Journal of Rural Health — led by Hazel Velasco Palacios, a doctoral student in rural sociology and in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies — the team explored how people were impacted by the loss of the area’s only health care institution.
“While we were interested in the closures in their community, we did not lead with this, choosing instead to ask questions such as ‘What are some of the challenges that you think the town and the people who live here are facing?’” Brant said. “The fact that so many respondents answered this question by talking about the closures signaled to us how these closures were top of their list of concerns.”
They found that following the loss of the area’s only clinic and pharmacy, community members reported having to travel farther for basic health care needs, which added stress to their lives. People also reported becoming increasingly dependent on others to get care — for example, needing to rely on neighbors or friends for rides.
Velasco Palacios said while this reliance on social networks demonstrates the self-resilience of the community, it also posed challenges.
“In cases where networks were not robust or relationships became strained, some residents struggled to access reliable care,” she said. “This dual nature of social networks — both a critical lifeline and a potential vulnerability — adds nuance to our understanding of how rural communities adapt to the loss of essential services.”
Residents also reported that this restricted access led to people being more likely to delay seeking care, to call on emergency medical services and to ration medication to make it last longer, suggesting that the loss of local health care institutions could contribute to negative health outcomes.
But the researchers found that the loss of places not obviously linked to health — such as grocery stores and banks — also has the potential to impact health and well-being. Because these spaces are often multifunctional and the only one of their kind in the area, Brant said, losing these places may be especially impactful in rural areas.
“For example, the loss of the town’s only grocery store limited people’s access to fresh food and also their access to social connection,” she said. “Because it was one of the few central institutions in the community, it operated as a community hub.”
The loss of certain places, such as the area’s pharmacy and health care facility, especially impacted more vulnerable groups, the researchers said. These groups included older adults, people with disabilities and working-class families, who reported delays in accessing care and the loss of trusted care providers.
While both studies illustrated how impactful the loss of these community institutions were to residents, the researchers said future work could continue to explore the loss of essential spaces across other varied, more diverse rural landscapes.
Jennifer Kowalkowski, assistant professor of nursing, and Jorden Jackson, graduate student in rural sociology and demography, were also co-authors on the studies.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute helped support this research.
The National Center for Environmental Health and Children’s Environmental Health Network are accepting applications from communities for the 2025 Cancer and Environment Mini-Grants: Building Unusual Patterns of Cancer and Environmental Concerns opportunity. The deadline to apply is Jan. 13. Please see below for more information. Please contact Sarah Goodwin (sgoodwin@nchh.org) or Ashely Williams (awilliams@nchh.org) with any questions.
To help communities build capacity and advance scientific understanding of unusual patterns of cancer or efforts to understand potential relationships with environmental hazards, the National Center for Healthy Housing (NCHH) and the Children’s Environmental Health Network (CEHN) invite communities to apply for a bundled award of financial and technical support over six months that includes access to technical assistance from a network of national experts, opportunities to engage in peer learning, and a $25,000 grant that may provide funding for unique needs specific to a community or its members when addressing unusual patterns of cancer and environmental concerns.
They are offering these mini-grants to support communities that have concerns about unusual patterns of cancer. Communities will be able to build capacity, make connections with experts who can evaluate cancer data, review existing or new data on environmental hazards, and develop sustainable workplans to facilitate the investigation of cancer and environmental hazards. Grantees will also have opportunities to connect with other communities that have similar concerns.
Local, regional, U.S. territorial, tribal, or state nonprofit and/or community-based groups or organizations are eligible to apply for this grant opportunity.
Note that groups do not need to be a registered nonprofit or 501(c)(3) to apply. Organizations must be based in the United States. For-profit organizations are not eligible to apply.
Applications are due no later than 11:59 p.m. on Monday, January 13, 2025. To preview the application, visit here. To submit an application, visit here. Please contact Sarah Goodwin (sgoodwin@nchh.org) or Ashely Williams (awilliams@nchh.org) with any questions.
Apply by February 19, 2025
The Rural Health Network Development Planning Program supports the planning and development of rural integrated health care networks with specific focus on collaboration of entities to establish or improve local capacity and care coordination in underserved communities.
Specifically, the program uses the concept of developing networks as a strategy for linking rural health care network participants together to achieve greater collective capacity to overcome local challenges, expand access and improve the quality of care in the rural communities these organizations serve.
The program helps network participants work together on three legislative aims:
The intent is that rural health networks will do the following:
A total of $3,500,000 is available to fund 35 awards at $100,000 each.
Click here for additional information and the application package.
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development Under Secretary Dr. Basil Gooden announced that USDA will pause accepting Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) applications for the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP). IRA applications are those requesting federal grant funding of up to 50 percent of total eligible project costs. The last day to submit a new IRA application for Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 funding will be December 31, 2024, at 4:30 PM local time in the respective applicant’s time zone. This decision was made due to the continued overwhelming response to the funding opportunities made possible by IRA.
USDA will close the REAP FY 2025 IRA funding opportunity earlier than anticipated as over 3,000 applications have already been received, requesting more than twice the amount of the announced available funding. This decision will allow USDA time to dedicate the necessary resources and attention to the growing backlog of applications.
Additionally, USDA will not withdraw any FY 2024 IRA applications that have not been fully processed by December 31, 2024. The Agency will continue to process the remaining IRA FY 2024 applications and FY 2025 applications received by December 31, 2024.
Applications that are fully processed, complete and eligible will compete for available funding.
This decision does not affect FY 2025 applications submitted for Farm Bill funding. Farm Bill applications are those requesting federal grant funding of up to 25 percent of total eligible project costs. These applications can be submitted through March 31, 2025.
USDA anticipates accepting both REAP IRA and Farm Bill applications again starting on July 1, 2025, for Fiscal Year 2026 funding.
USDA appreciates your continued support and interest in the Rural Energy for America Program.
For any further inquiries regarding this announcement please contact your State Energy Coordinator.
If you would like to subscribe to USDA Rural Development updates, visit our GovDelivery subscriber page.
The FISA Foundation has announced a new request for proposals (RFP) to improve access to health care for people with disabilities in southwestern Pennsylvania. They will be funding grants up to $20,000 as part of a new initiative. The deadline to submit proposals is March 3rd. There is an informational session regarding the RFP on January 29th at 1pm via Zoom.
Click here for more information.
Click here to register for the informational session.
