What does it take to keep a rural hospital open in the state with the highest rural hospital closure rate in the country?
Find out at AHCJ’s Rural Health Workshop 2022, which will be held July 14 in Chattanooga, Tenn.
Registration is open. This year marks the first in-person rural health workshop since 2019.
The free, one-day workshop, presented by AHCJ and the Center for Excellence in Health Care Journalism, will give journalists an opportunity to hear from and connect with health care and policy experts and researchers who focus on rural health. Stephanie Boynton, vice president and chief executive officer, Erlanger Western Carolina Hospital and Erlanger Bledsoe Hospital, will talk about how a hospital just days away from closing its doors found a path to survival and what that has meant to a community.
With 80% of rural America now described as a “health care desert,” the urgency of providing health care access for people who live outside urban areas has never been greater.
The program will feature sessions on finding and interrogating data, how to judge the quality of the programs that will receive opioid settlement funds, and what it takes to build the rural health care pipeline, among others. Check out the preliminary program for more details.
The hosts for the Rural Health Workshop 2022 are the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga College of Medicine, the University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Nursing, Cempa Community Care and Erlanger Hospitals. The event’s sponsors are the Helmsley Charitable Trust, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Commonwealth Fund.
To register, visit this webpage or call (423) 756-5150. Use this link to book your hotel room at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Chattanooga Downtown. Watch AHCJ’s website and social media platforms for important program announcements and updates.
