I applaud the effort, but the challenges of rural health are even greater than just proximity to a hospital. For example, in my area we have multiple hospitals and clinics, but... have heart issues? Hour drive. Need cancer care? Likely driving between 3-5 hours toward one of the bigger metro areas. There is exactly one (!!) urologist in town. Need some kind of basic surgery (gall bladder, for example) guess what - there are a couple guys that rotate here every few weeks from one of the major cities (where they actually live). That's before we get into the clusterF that is the American insurance system.
Our rural hospitals are basically triage care and basic immunizations / antibiotics.
Isn't that a straightforwardly expected result of low population density?
If your area doesn't have many people, that means less demand for certain things, potentially not enough demand to keep permanent staff for particular types of care.
Of course, the other issue is that doctors (and nurses?) may simply not want to live in rural areas, even with the financial advantages.
I don’t really disagree, but for what it’s worth within an hour radius of my location there are roughly 400,000 people… so how dense do things have to be before it’s enough to support specialty care?
Hmm, that does seem like it should be enough to support things like heart care or general surgery, there should be enough demand. I imagine people who actually work in the industry might have some insights on why this would happen.
Our rural hospitals are basically triage care and basic immunizations / antibiotics.