In the country, there aren’t enough doctors.
Nearly 80% of rural America is “medically underserved,” according to the federal government. One in 5 Americans lives in the country, but only 1 in 10 doctors work out there. In Texas, 35 counties have no doctors. Another 30 counties have exactly one doctor.
One of those doctors, Ed Garner, has been practicing rural family medicine for 41 years.
“Out here,” he told the Washington Post, “it’s just me.” Garner is part of a small contingent of those committed to serving rural areas despite the challenges. In West Texas, he’s everything from county medical director to an immigration detention center physician.
“If not for you,” one patient told him, “I might be gone already.”
At least one immersion program is hoping to generate more rural doctors like Garner, who at 68, plans to retire soon. In Sedalia, Missouri, medical students tour the 20,000-person town to see if it could be a spot where they’d see themselves settling down.
“We have to make sure when they do come to visit us that they walk away saying, ‘That was such a friendly area and everyone there was so nice,'” Beth Everts, director of recruitment for Bothwell Regional Health Center in Sedalia, told Kansas radio. “And they can see themselves living and working here.”
What health experts call “the gray wave,” the disproportionate ratio of patients to doctors in rural areas, is getting worse.
Rural doctors tend to be three years older than urban doctors. About half of them are over 50. More than a quarter of them, like Garner, are over 60.
America’s rural areas need healing. So do the people who live there.
