Rural health care is a tough, worthwhile challenge

Looka into Your Health
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    Providing care to rural residents is not an easy task on multiple levels. Specifically, today I would like to talk about the challenges of being a provider in the rural health care arena. It takes a special person with special talents to manage patients in a rural setting. Not only is access and distance to tertiary or higher-level medical services challenging, the scope and variety of medical problems we face can also be unique as well.  To be a rural provider you must be good at a little of everything from pediatrics to adult, to elderly care, including a little ortho, some cardiology, etc. Now we all have our passions and things we do best. However, the bottom line is that not only do we have a broad knowledge base, but we also have a broad skill set as well. One minute you could be taking care of an infant well-child check, and the next called down to the emergency room for a motor vehicle accident. You might then be called to a patient on the floor not doing well and finally go back to seeing your patients in the clinic.
    According to the National Rural Health Association, here are some facts about rural medicine. There is an uneven distribution of providers to the rural population as compared to urban with 39.8 physicians per 100,000 patients in rural and 53.1 per 100,000 in urban areas. Rural residents tend to be poorer and about 25 percent of children in the rural population live in poverty. More than 50 percent of all motor vehicle crashes occur in the rural setting. There tends to be more prevalence of diabetes and coronary heart disease. There is a chronic shortage of mental health professionals nationwide, but it is more difficult in a rural setting and often associated with a stigma. Rural youth are twice as likely to commit suicide. These are just a few facts that caught my eye; for more information and facts about rural health visit www.ruralhealthweb.org.
    I have worked in very rural areas of Alaska, Montana, New Mexico and Colorado, and these facts are not surprising. Aside from having to travel to see specialists, getting patients to specialists urgently is sometimes “fun.” Weather is a huge factor, but given our remoteness on the eastern plains, sometimes the weather is fine here, but not so good in Denver or vice versa. That requires some creative methods to get patients to Denver sometimes and having the rendezvous with a helicopter or fixed wing between here and Denver, or a provider having to ride with a critically ill patient with the EMS service. Other times we must wait for an advanced life support EMS unit to come from another city or back from the transfer we sent them on earlier. I must say that great strides have been made here in Holyoke, and this has been made easier with the progress of the EMS service as well as the arrival of the AirLife helicopter base.

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Holyoke Enterprise

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Holyoke CO 80734