The University of Kansas Health System is treating a total of 33 COVID patients today, down from 35 yesterday. Other significant numbers:
- 18 with the active virus today, 15 yesterday
- 3 in ICU, 1 yesterday
- 0 on a ventilator, 0 yesterday
- 15 hospitalized, but out of acute infection phase, 20 yesterday
Key points from today’s guests:
Dr. Steve Stites, chief medical officer, The University of Kansas Health System
- Nearly one million Kansans live in a rural area -- that's about a third of the state's population -- and for them, healthcare can be a real challenge.
- Many small towns only have a handful of doctors and the nearest hospital can be more than an hour's drive with limited emergency equipment and limited ability to see a specialist.
- Today, we're looking at the challenges facing rural health care providers in caring for their communities with healthcare leaders from across Kansas.
- Kansas Governor Laura Kelly signed a proclamation declaring tomorrow as National Rural Health Day and health leaders from around the state are gathering for the Rural Health Symposium tomorrow in Hays.
Chad Austin, president and CEO of the Kansas Hospital Association
- This is an opportunity to recognize and appreciate rural healthcare providers.
- In Kansas we have 122 hospitals, of which about 95 of those hospitals are rural hospitals.
- For decades, we spent time encouraging preventive health care in smaller communities where routine screenings, vaccination rates and reproductive health services are lower, along with poor access to primary care.
- While those challenges remain, the summit tomorrow is focused on more urgent issues, including workforce shortages and financial sustainability.
Larry Van Der Wege, administrator, Lindsborg Community Hospital
- The last year has been very challenging for our community hospitals. We've had a number of retirements and people looking at different industries.
- But I think that there's a lot of opportunities to work in healthcare as well -- how can we inspire the youth of our state to be able to get into healthcare occupations?
- We immediately think about access for race or ethnicity, but there's also the challenges of people in poverty.
- People at different ages in our geriatric population, sometimes have trouble to find ways to get to the clinic or get to the emergency department or to access care -- there's a lot of different ways that we need to evaluate the diversity and equity and find ways to help provide access to everyone.
George Stover, CEO of hospital district #1 of Rice County
- We're faced with the same workforce challenges in nursing, radiology and our laboratory
- Being centered around community colleges that that feed out nursing students allows us to work with those nursing departments
- We're finding that one of the biggest challenges for us is the number of students in the nursing programs – this is one of the biggest needs across the state.
Carrie Saia, CEO, Holton Community Hospital
- We've seen less and less specialty doctors coming into our organization.
- When you have fewer cardiology visits coming in or a dermatologist or a podiatrist who’s retiring, those are specialty areas that are not easily replaced.
- COVID and the pandemic have forced CEOs to talk together so we're collaborating with our competitors in typically environments that you wouldn't have seen before.
- We are working as a group to address how we can possibly recruit specialty doctors to come into our areas and help.
Dr. Robert Moser, dean of the KU School of Medicine
- We've expanded our four-year medical education into Salina and Wichita directly to address some of the need for having opportunities for students who might grew up in a more rural setting that would like to train in a setting other than a large metropolitan area like Kansas City.
- I think it puts them a little closer to some of our rural communities and our providers that are more experienced with some of the challenges delivering rural health care, so that they can experience that in their training.
- Many of the programs that we've created over the years, like the Kansas Medical Student Loan Program, to try to encourage students to choose primary care in rural areas.
- Our rural Scholars Program, which is identifying students from rural communities during their sophomore year in college, to go through an early admissions process and once they are accepted into that they're guaranteed admission to the School of Medicine, which allows them to choose at which campus to train.
Dr. Dana Hawkinson, medical director of Infection Prevention and Control, The University of Kansas Health System
- Unfortunately, it looks like we may be seeing somewhat of a surge on nationwide COVID numbers, but hopefully it is more of that last Omicron surge as opposed to the last Delta surge where there were extreme numbers in the hospital.
- One thing to point out is this the first major cold wave across the United States and this is driving people indoors -- this is when we start to see the real impact.
- There are some early flu season red flags suggesting it's on track to be a very, very difficult year. The latest data from the CDC show extraordinarily high numbers of positive flu tests reported from labs around the U.S.
- We believe that there is fairly good efficacy of the vaccine this year to help protect against symptomatic infection from the different flu strains.
Thursday at 8:00 a.m. is the next Morning Medical Update. What would you do to save your own child? Tomorrow you’ll meet a mom who worked hard for three years to improve her own health so she could donate her kidney to her son. Plus meet the team of doctors from two different area hospitals who made it all happen.
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