Two community health organizations in East Ky. offer hope for better care, reformed or not

None of the health-care reform bills before Congress are likely to affect mounting health problems in Central Appalachia, says one rural health expert, but two examples of rural health care done correctly in Eastern Kentucky are providing hope for others, reports Frank Browning of Kaiser Health News. "It’s not all about the money," Dr. Forest Callico, former director of the Appalachian Regional Hospitals and a rural health advisor to both the Clinton and second Bush administrations, told Browning, a Kentucky native. “We have to transform the way we take care of people.”

Browning highlights the efforts of Hazard-Perry County Community Ministries and Harlan Countians for a Healthy Community as two examples of good rural health care. Community Ministries, which has no religious affiliation despite its name, was organized in part by Gerry Roll, who says she wants to "create a community that values good health." In an effort to encourage locals to seek the medical care they need, "Community Ministries’ 'lay health workers' go into patients’ homes once or twice a week, call them on the phone, drive them to the grocery or even organize regular walks with their neighbors — in short, taking an interest in their life," Browning reports.

Harlan organizer Annie Fox thinks the group's efforts to tackle everything from walking trails to clinical care to adolescent drug-abuse prevention has saved the local Appalachian Regional Hospital at least a half a million dollars a year in non-compensated emergency-room visits and other care. "Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District, which includes Harlan and Perry counties, has the lowest life expectancy of any district in America: 72.6 years for men and 76.4 for women," Browning writes. Despite those numbers, Callico says the programs in Hazard and Harlan, which provide solid, bottom-up models for a profound shift in the overall health policy debate, are essential to any national reform effort that takes actual care seriously. (Read more)

The full story linked above also contains four videos about some of the women behind the two programs. Here's the one on Gerry Roll.