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Alabama Arise Action to urge closing of health coverage gap at State House news conference apr.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from apr.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Another Alabama hospital to close labor and delivery services al.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from al.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Alabama Public Radio is celebrating forty years on the air in 2022. The APR news team is diving into our archives to bring you encore airings of the best of our coverage. That includes this story from 2018. APR spent a year investigating rural health in Alabama. The effort was recognized with the fiftieth Robert F. Kennedy Journalism award for radio. One issue we addressed was how to get hospitals into under served rural counties ....
The Alabama National Guard is considering a deployment of mobile COVID-19 vaccination units in some of the state s heaviest hit areas. State Health Officer Dr. Scott Harris said Friday details are still being ironed out, but the current plan is to send out two mobile units into the Black Belt to vaccinate as many as 1,000 people per day. The units would move locations every day, Harris said. This allows us to get to part of the state where access to care is a problem, where transportation is a problem, Harris said. We re primarily thinking of this as a tool to reach more rural areas. ....
What about Coosa County? The central Alabama county, home to less than 11,000 residents, has no hospital. Its county health department closed its doors in 2016, shuffling residents to county departments to the north and east for services. Hutcherson, fresh to Coosa County’s emergency management director position after years at the state EMA, wondered what his residents were supposed to do. “We were being forgotten,” Hutcherson said. “They needed someone to remind them: ‘Look, we re here, too.’ So much emphasis was put on getting vaccinations to health departments, and we don t have one.” Rural residents have for years fallen through the cracks of Alabama’s health care and economic infrastructure. But a raging pandemic has exposed those cracks as fault lines, revealing disproportionately fatal outcomes and higher rates of disease in rural communities isolated and with limited access to health care. ....