Rural Health Toolkit

Rural hospitals are threatened with closure due to pressure from many sources.  Government regulations limit funding and lack of community support reduces patient volume.  Extended hours and isolated working conditions cause high turnover in personnel.  Some government programs have been enacted to reduce closures, but information on these programs may be difficult to locate.  Administrators need a mechanism to share information on methods used and the results of these efforts to prevent duplication of effort and wasted resources. 

Rural hospital administrators and community decision-makers need current information on strategies for maintaining viability of their hospitals.  Specifically, eight areas were identified to support the existence of rural hospitals.  In each of these areas, team members searched for electronic resources to aid interested parties.  Each resource is annotated and linked through a website created by the consultant team. 

The team serving as information consultants for this project is composed of graduate students at the University of North Texas in the School of Library and Information Science.  This project fulfills course requirements in the health informatics specialist curriculum.  The aim of the consultant team is to provide a toolkit of electronic resources useful to rural health care proponents. 

The toolkit is offered at no charge to rural hospital administrators and other interested parties.  However, maintenance of the links and updates as new resources become available are beyond the scope of the project.  Therefore, it is the earnest desire of the creation team that this information will be incorporated into the website of a rural health care agency that will maintain the site.  This might be TORCH, a Texas AHEC, the Center for Rural Health Initiatives, or an interested hospital.