Rural health challenges and opportunities, Part 2: The hospital administrators’ perspective

The Health Disparities Podcast

When we consider what it takes to improve the health of rural Americans and address rural health disparities, there's no one size fits all solution. Because, as the saying goes, if you’ve seen one rural community, you’ve seen one rural community.

In our latest podcast series, we are digging into rural health: the challenges, and the opportunities. We’re highlighting the diversity of rural communities and addressing common misconceptions..

In today’s episode, Health Disparities podcast host Sarah Hohman checks in with three people who work in rural hospital leadership and administration, doing incredibly important work, often with limited resources:

• Michael Calhoun, Chief Executive Officer/Executive Director for Citizens Memorial Healthcare, an integrated healthcare system serving over 130,000 residents in southwest Missouri.
• Mandy Shelast, the President of Marshfield Clinic Health System’s Michigan and Southern Regions, and the President of the National Association of Rural Health Clinics.
• Dr. John Bartlett, a practicing primary care physician and the Vice President of Medical Affairs for the Michigan Region of Marshfield Clinic.

Some of the biggest challenges are related to the health care workforce and staffing, in particular for specialty care.

“If we lose a chemo nurse in a town of 10,000 there's not five other ones looking for that job,” Bartlett says.

“What I'm concerned about is just our aging population and how we're going to be able to train a workforce enough to be able to care for all the people that need it, that's a real concern,” Calhoun says.

All three guests addressed common misconceptions about rural America, and emphasized the benefits of rural, including a slower pace of life and having providers who are passionate about the mission of providing excellent, personalized health care.

“The patients that we care for are our friends and our family and our community members,” Shelast says. “We take care of them on the very best days of their life — maybe when they're welcoming a life into the world — and on the worst days, when they're having a medical emergency or they've received a terminal diagnosis, and it is just such a great experience to be able to go up to that person and say, 'I'm here for you.’”

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