Coronavirus' special challenges for rural health

If you aren’t tired of news about the COVID-19 pandemic, you probably haven’t been paying attention.

If you’d like to learn more about the issues surrounding a virus outbreak, however, you might want to take in the Netflix series “Pandemic How to prevent an outbreak.”

Although it deals with influenza, the documentary is timely, released only last year, and eerily relevant to the current coronavirus pandemic.

One of the characters is the sole doctor in a small rural Oklahoma hospital, a situation not uncommon in rural Nebraska and Kansas.

She gets to know her patients and their families personally, and plays an important role in her community in general, not just its health care.

Jeffrey P. Gold, M.D., offered a similar perspective to RFD-TV viewers on Tuesday. His comments were shared with us by the Nebraska Medical Center, where he is chancellor.

Like the Oklahoma hospital in the Netflix docuseries, rural Nebraska hospitals are of special concern, Gold said.

“If one or two nurses or one or two physicians were to have to be quarantines or become ill in a large urban medical center, they could be covered for relatively easily,” Gold said. “But if one of two critical physicians or nurses, pharmacists, etc., in a small critical access hospital were to become ill, that could be an impact of totally different proportion. So we have to watch very carefully, stay tightly connected to what’s going on in the rural hospitals and attempt to try to prevent exceeding the capacity of what those hospitals may need to deliver.”

He said good information is especially important for rural health care providers regarding precautions such as appropriate use of scarce protective equipment such as masks, gowns and caps.

“Equipment and supplies -- do our critical access hospitals and small community hospitals have an adequate amount of that? I can tell you in the large cities we are struggling with that. While we do have a reasonable mount of that material on hand, it’s certainly not infinite and if this continues to grow as it has along the coasts to rural America, those supplies are going to be particularly limited in our rural and particularly critical access hospitals.”

Other concerns Dr. Gold mentioned included small hospitals’ ability to screen, test and diagnose in a timely fashion or handle a “surge” of cases like that experienced in other parts of the world.

He called for expanded use of telehealth made possible by broadband internet service, an ongoing concern in rural Nebraska.

Even if we don’t have access to fast internet, nearly everyone has a telephone, and it should be the first thing we use if we suspect we may be infected.

“If there are individuals who have a fever or a cough or are somewhat short of breath, and they’re not sure what to do, in a rural or an urban setting, the best thing to do is make a phone call rather than get in the car and head off to your local emergency room or health professions office,” Dr. Gold said.

That’s the best advice we can offer: If you suspect you may have COVID-19 or simply have a cold or flu, call your health care provider before you head for the ER or walk-in clinic.