Rural America 'Medical Deserts': One Doctor For 11,000 Sq. Miles
Last edited Mon Sep 30, 2019, 02:44 AM - Edit history (2)
'Out here, it’s just me’: In the medical desert of rural America, one doctor for 11,000 square miles, Wash Post, 9/29/19.
VAN HORN, Tex. —He woke up to the sound of an ambulance’s siren, knowing that the ambulance would soon be delivering another patient to him. Ed Garner, 68, changed into medical scrubs and walked out to his truck. He dialed the hospital as he started driving toward the emergency room.
“Any idea what might be coming?” he asked, but all anyone knew for certain was that the ambulance was still on its way out to a patient. Sometimes the paramedics were back within minutes, and other trips took nearly two hours. Sometimes they delivered Garner a patient in minor distress, and other times they brought him unresponsive victims of car crashes, heart attacks, drug overdoses or ranching accidents. “Do we know anything yet?” Garner asked again, a few minutes later. A stethoscope dangled from his rearview mirror. He checked his police scanner, but it was quiet. He looked toward the adjacent interstate but saw no obvious wrecks.
He lit a cigarette and rolled down the window as he drove by the dusty ranches and dry lakebeds of West Texas. He’d started smoking to cope with the stress of medical school, but now he’d been practicing rural family medicine for 41 years as the stresses continued to mount. He was the only working doctor left to care for three remote counties east of El Paso, an area similar in size to the entire state of Maryland, home to far-flung oil encampments, a desolate stretch of interstate, communities of drifters living off the electric grid, and highway towns made up of truck stops and budget motels. “A wild place of last resort,” was how Garner described parts of his territory, and for every person in every kind of medical trouble, the true last resort was him.
Now his phone rang and he answered. “How bad is it?” he asked, and a nurse told him the ambulance was on its way back to the hospital with a truck driver who had collapsed at a gas station and couldn’t move his legs. “Just give me a minute,” Garner said. “I’ll be there as quick as I can.”
In the medical desert that has become rural America, nothing is more basic or more essential than access to doctors, but they are increasingly difficult to find. The federal government now designates nearly 80 percent of rural America as “medically underserved.” It is home to 20 percent of the U.S. population but fewer than 10 percent of its doctors, and that ratio is worsening each year because of what health experts refer to as “the gray wave.” Rural doctors are three years older than urban doctors on average, with half over 50 and more than a quarter beyond 60. Health officials predict the number of rural doctors will decline by 23 percent over the next decade as the number of urban doctors remains flat.
In Texas alone, 159 of the state’s 254 counties have no general surgeons, 121 counties have no medical specialists, and 35 counties have no doctors at all. Thirty more counties are each forced to rely on just a single doctor, like Garner, a family physician by training...
More, http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/out-here-its-just-me-in-the-medical-desert-of-rural-america-one-doctor-for-11000-square-miles/ar-AAHZBCH?ocid=HPCOMMDHP15
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