Rural Hospital Closures:
“The ambulance is our emergency room”
–the voices of rural Tennessee
EXCERPTS FROM EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Since 2010, Tennessee has had the second highest number of hospital closures in the nation, and the highest number of closures per population. Seventy five percent of Tennessee’s 25 remaining essential access rural hospitals are at high risk of closure in the next few years if current healthcare policies and practices remain the same. Bottom line for Tennessee’s rural communities: over one quarter of Tennessee’s rural counties have no hospital, and one fifth have no emergency room services, and that number will continue to grow unless concerted effort is made to prevent that from happening.
In response to the steady and harmful loss of Tennessee’s rural hospitals, the Tennessee Health Care Campaign (THCC) developed a partnership with community representatives and academic partners to identify factors that influence these closures and their effects on rural communities. Our goals were to identify innovative strategies to reestablish health care infrastructures, learn lessons that might prevent future closures, and ultimately build a broader advocacy network to respond to the problem. During 2018-20, THCC gathered information from a panel of rural health experts, community listening sessions in six counties representing communities that had lost a hospital or were expected to, and a series of interviews with stakeholders including administrators, patients, and others, we explored the Tennessee hospital closure issue.