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Rural NC hospitals struggling to find workers

The former Yadkin Valley Community Hospital in Yadkinville which closed in 2015. PAUL GARBER/WFDD FILE

Some smaller hospitals are facing staff shortages that have caused administrators to change the way they provide care, speakers at a virtual town hall on the state of rural health care in North Carolina said Thursday. 

It's been called the "Great Resignation," people quitting their jobs for other opportunities or leaving the workplace altogether in the wake of the pandemic.

Dr. James Hoekstra is president of Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist's High Point Medical Center and is on the board of Alleghany Memorial Hospital in Sparta. He says the job churn has hit rural hospitals hard.

“What we've been left with is a situation where we've had to hire a lot of what we call travelers or contract labor to make sure we keep our missions running,” he says. “And we've had to change our care models.”

Encouraging STEM education for young people and investing more in community colleges were among the suggestions for boosting the health care workforce.

Speakers pointed out that many rural hospitals are in areas that are losing population as younger people move to urban areas. That leaves an older than usual population to care for.

The North Carolina Healthcare Association hosted the virtual town hall.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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