The Bill Lane Center for the American West and Stanford Medicine are pleased to co-issue this white paper on telehealth in the rural American West. The paper builds upon the Lane Center’s earlier work from our Rural West Initiative, as well as ongoing research by our undergraduate teams who have been exploring connections between environment and health in the American West.
This stategic action plan comes in advance of the Healthier Rural America Summit on September 15. This document proposes a framework to foster sustainable, resilient innovation and change with identified, supported and targeted initiatives leading to positive results. The document is being shared in a non-partisan manner to key stakeholders at the federal, state and local levels.
Two decades into the 21st century, in the midst of a pandemic that has forced people to work and go to school remotely, broadband connections fail to reach millions of Americans. Communities in many areas are struggling with this handicap, especially in the rural West. Our panel will examine what we know and don’t know about the severity of the problem and what it will take to fix it.
Phillip Polakoff, MD, and Dennis Berens, MA, recently released "A Healthier Rural America, Imagining a Better Future: Creating a Strategic Plan for Rural Health," a policy position paper addressing current challenges in rural healthcare. This document proposes a framework to foster sustainable, resilient innovation and change with identified, supported and targeted actions leading to positive results.
Read Gabrielle Torrance's honors thesis on upward mobility in rural America.
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This spring, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, we may feel as if we are living in a parallel universe, a universe focused sharply on finding a workable response.
The impact in our rural states is to add significant stress to their already compromised health care capacity. Workable responses must understand and include that reality. Rural America has an older, sicker, and poorer population than the rest of the nation and fewer resources to care for them.
Justin Farrell sits down with Bruce Cain to discuss his new book. This hour-long talk includes a talk by Professor Farrell on his book and some of its findings as well as a question and answer back-and-forth with the live audience.
From the publisher:
What is the "rural West?" In this presentation, the Bill Lane Center's Geoff McGhee offers definitions of "rural" from several U.S. agencies. He posits that rural Western America is defined by a number of factors, including distance, large amounts of public land, tribal lands and reservations, and disconnectedness.
Esparto, an unincorporated municipality in California’s Central Valley, could be almost any small town of the rural American West. It developed around a train station established by subsidiaries of the Southern Pacific Railroad Co., under Leland Stanford’s direction, in 1888. For the better part of the ensuing century, Esparto’s prosperity was caught up in the vicissitudes of railroad profitability. After the railway withdrew operations in the late 1950s, local businesses, services and population began to decline.
Berens and Polakoff meditate on the recent COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on rural Americans in an op-ed published in the Omaha World-Herald.
