Rescuing Rural Health Care — What Can We Do?

In 1979, after 30 years serving the rural communities of Southern Humboldt, the Garberville Hospital, one of the last privately owned hospitals in California, was about to shut its doors. A courageous band of community members — business leaders, timber people, ranchers, professionals, back-to-the-landers and retirees — got together and organized an effort to save the hospital.

Taxes were about as popular in 1979 as they are today. But the community voted overwhelmingly to support a bond measure, funded by property taxes, to purchase the hospital. The Southern Humboldt Community Hospital District was formed and still functions successfully today. This year, construction begins on a new state-of-the art $86 million facility.

Today, Humboldt County, like much of rural America, faces a healthcare crisis. Sixty-five percent of rural communities have a shortage of primary care providers, not to mention the dysfunction of the broken national healthcare system within which we operate. The economic and human costs are incalculable.

So what can a rural community like ours do to fix it?

My honest answer is, I don’t know. But here’s what I do know. I know that when people come together to solve a common problem, they always find ways to make things better.

I don’t mean to minimize the problem. When I was executive director of Redwoods Rural Health Center in the ’80s, I spent a lot of time trying to recruit physicians. I heard all the reasons why this place might not be attractive to someone finishing a residency program and facing a huge burden of medical school debt. Humboldt County is not for everybody. But like those of us who choose to live here, there are healthcare professionals who will love what this place has to offer.

It won’t be easy, but we know how to organize complex conversations, how to generate funding for good ideas, how to come up with creative solutions to apparently intractable problems.

We can learn from other rural communities that have figured out how to attract and retain healthcare professionals. We can build partnerships among healthcare providers, employers and others to support our medical community.

If our elected officials or the leaders of our major healthcare institutions could have solved this problem by themselves, it would have been solved by now. So what to do? Of course, it’s always an option to continue to complain. I certainly do my share. But since health care is something we all need, just maybe it will be possible to bring people together — even people who disagree about almost everything else — to make this a place where medical care is abundant.

Allan Katz, longtime community activist and former executive director of the Community Health Alliance of Humboldt-Del Norte, lives in Eureka and Port Townsend, Washington.