Providing quality health care in a rural area comes with a unique set of challenges. There are limited resources, difficulties attracting the right staff, and your patient list is going to only get longer.
Rural healthcare providers must constantly innovate to ensure that their communities receive the care that they need. It’s important to know exactly how you can improve your rural health clinic, so we’ve put together a list of ways that you can do just that.
- Introducing telemedicine. Companies like My Mountain Mover work to help you hire the best virtual healthcare assistants for your business to help you with exactly this. Telemedicine has truly revolutionized healthcare, especially in rural areas where patients often live far from medical facilities. With the help of telehealth services, you can provide remote consultations, follow-ups, and even some diagnostic services. It’s this innovation that saves a lot of time and travel costs for patients and ensures that they still receive timely care.
- Work with the local community. One of the biggest benefits of actually moving your healthcare clinic rural in the first place is that you get to rub shoulders with local communities and make partnerships that way. Building strong ties with community organisations creates a more holistic patient care model. You can partner with local schools, churches and nonprofits because they can provide more services. It’s these partnerships that help to address any social determinants of health, which are sometimes more pronounced in rural areas. Collaboration with local food banks, for example, can improve nutrition among your patient population, directly impacting their overall health.
- Stay up to date with medical technology. A good way to ensure that you can provide high quality care to your patients is to ensure that your rural healthcare clinic has the necessary medical equipment to diagnose and treat patients effectively. Technologies such as portable ultrasound machines and point of care testing devices can make a big difference. In fact, innovative diagnostic tools can improve your patient outcomes exponentially.
- Recruit and retain the professionals you hire. We talked already about hiring virtual assistants for help with admin support and diagnostics, but you could also look at how your hiring processes are working for actual staff on site. The biggest challenge for a health care facility in a rural area is attracting and then retaining skilled professionals. Rural areas are so far away from the usual amenities that it can be difficult to get people to stay. Offering competitive salaries and benefits is essential, as is creating a supportive work environment where people don’t burn out too fast. You should consider providing opportunities that include professional development and scheduling along with housing assistance, especially in rural places that don’t often have empty homes available.
- Make the most of what you’ve got. In a rural healthcare clinic, you have to be efficient when you have limited resources. Making the most of the resources that you do have is helpful when you start by conducting A thorough assessment of your current operations. It’s from here you can identify any operations that need improvement.Electronic health records can help you to streamline any admin tasks and that helps you to free up more time for patient care. You could also look to train your staff in multiple roles so that your clinic runs more smoothly.
Reimagine Main St. A thriving town is important for a healthcare facility to keep going. In keeping with the whole idea of if you build it, they will come. Healthcare services that are delivered on Main Street, not outside of the town, will attract larger numbers of people. If you have to be in a remote area with your clinic, make sure that you’re as close to the main populace as possible. Every remote town, no matter how rural they are, has some kind of Main Street, so try to keep your clinic available on that street. This is where most people will congregate when they’re looking to get their shopping or they’re looking to go for a coffee. You want to be noticed.- Redefine what healthcare means. In a rural area, a health care system isn’t defined by a monolithic hospital or a medical facility that is made-up of seven different medical partners. With a health care provider at the centre, other related service suppliers located on Main Street will create a hub where fitness and Wellness become a part of everyday life. What does healthcare mean for your clinic? Are you covering GP services or just dentistry? Are you looking at eye health or skin care health? Sometimes building up your healthcare clinic means looking at ways that you can improve every aspect of healthcare in one area.
- Keep one foot with the local council. A good way to improve your rural healthcare clinic is to know who you’re dealing with in government. Funding for rural health is not the easiest to get hold of, but if you know that you have someone you can talk to within a local community who can influence those decisions, you’ll be able to make improvements on your healthcare clinic for the patients in the local area. Even if the town that you’ve built your rural clinic in has only got 100 people in it, they still deserve good healthcare.
- Look at data healthcare technology. Even a rural and remote healthcare clinic needs to rely on technology to keep patient data safe. You want to ensure that nobody can just bust in and take what they want. So look at technology that can keep your data records secure. It makes all the difference to know that your healthcare facility is properly protected.
- Stay smiling! A great tip for improving your rural healthcare clinic is that you can encourage your patients to come to you en masse if you are positive, likeable and doing everything possible in their best interest. It makes such a difference to people when they know you care.
