Rural Hospitals Are Dying. This One Saved Itself —And Its Community

In September 2017, two weeks after Hurricane Irma pummeled South Georgia, Angela Ammons found her hospital on life support. It was her first day as CEO of Clinch Memorial Hospital. As she walked the halls, past oversized framed photos of the nearby Okefenokee Swamp, she felt relieved that the hurricane had spared the facility, but overwhelmed by the growing list of longstanding problems, from broken equipment to low staff morale. Soon after, an auditor informed Ammons of the hospital’s ninth consecutive year in the red. The hospital had just enough cash to pay for a couple more days of operations. With only two of its 25 patient beds filled and little revenue coming in, Ammons didn’t know if she could make payroll. If nothing changed, she would be forced to close a hospital that had served the 6,650-person Clinch County, including the small town of Homerville, Georgia, for over six decades. “Rural hospitals are an endangered species,” says Jimmy Lewis, CEO of Hometown Health, a professional association of four dozen rural Georgia hospitals. Clinch Memorial, he thought then, might become the state’s eighth shuttered rural hospital since 2010. Even before the coronavirus pandemic halted elective surgeries and the income streams they produce, rural areas had too few insured patients to sustain the hospitals built to serve them. But their empty beds could be of value, if linked up with city hospitals now facing a different problem: overcapacity, esp...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news