Rural health care : innovation in a changing environment /

Some 17 well-qualified authors focus on how to alleviate the "rural healthcare crisis" caused by rural hospital closings, chronic shortages of health care personnel, reduced federal and state dollar support, and the inability of rural hospitals to compete in expensive technologies with urban health centers. The authors explore ways to reverse the trend away from seeking one's care through rural providers. Several call for shifting the rural health care paradigm from "curing" models to "caring" models. In this latter model, thinking moves from concern about the rural hospital to seeing that hospital as the community health center, to concern about community-based health systems and then to thinking about the role of the hospital in those systems. Technology-based linkages that rural centers can forge with urban center technologies via computers and similar modalities are advocated. Innovations in technologies are discussed, such as the improved automated defibrillators now available to rural emergency medical technicians treating persons with cardiac problems. Useful explorations of the issues faced by rural health care institutions and caregivers. Faculty; professional. J. E. Allen; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill