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Summer 2014 • Kentucky
Rural hospitals are smaller in size than city hospitals, have limited assets and financial
reserves and a higher amount of Medicare patients.
related to lifestyle choices, environmental
factors, inadequate health insurance and
general lack of understanding of the healthcare system.
“[Kentucky is] last in the nation in physical
activity,” Weaver said. “We are close to the
top still in smoking; we have the worse diets
in the nation. We don’t do the things we
need to do to live longer. It’s a big problem.”
One key focus of a rural hospital is to
improve public health through educational
endeavors. This includes boosting people’s
health literacy. Health literacy, among other
things, means patients can understand and
follow directions on prescriptions.
“The problem is, [doctors] think, ‘I’ll hand
you a prescription, I’ll write something
down and you’ll understand it,’” Weaver
said. “But if you tell someone to take something twice a day, it does not occur to them
to space [the medications] out evenly during
the day and take it two times. They wonder
if they should maybe take two of them at
once or maybe take one in the morning and
then one at lunch.”
Communication, Weaver believes, helps
overcome these types of obstacles.
“Communication skills, to my mind, are
absolutely paramount for [rural] physicians,”
Weaver said. “If you’re shy, if you speak a
lot in jargon, if you’re not able to relate to
patients, you’re going to have a tough time
convincing people in a rural area that you
are so technically good they should see you.
You’ve got to be able to talk to people.”
Good communication also helps in discerning what a community needs. The rural hospital’s staff needs to talk to local residents
and not just rely on statistical data.
“To assess a community’s needs, you have to
talk to practically everybody,” Weaver said.
“You can look at the numbers, you can look
at the diseases that impact the community,
you can look at their life expectancy and so
forth. What you can’t get [from the data] is
[information such as]: What’s their access
to pharmacy services? How literate are the
people? Do they know there are some things
they need to visit their local doctor for and
some things they might need to go to a large
hospital for? Do they have a place where
they can exercise? Do they have access to
dietary information? Do they have access to
fresh vegetables and things like that? When
you go for a needs assessment, it really takes
a combination of talking to people and
scouting out the community itself.”
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