Home Remedy: A small town solves its physician shortage.
RESIDENTS OF ALBANY, population 1,730, in northwestern Missouri, aren’t shy about talking up their town. They point to its scant crime, good schools, and tidy, Victorian-era downtown, where handsome red-brick buildings whisper of an affluent past. Beyond its family-friendly movie house and nine-hole golf course lie farm fields—wheat, corn, and soybeans mostly—and woodlands with abundant hunting and fishing.
Yet for all of Albany’s charm, trying to entice doctors and nurses to resettle there, an hour northeast of the nearest city, St. Joseph, has proved extremely difficult. Nearly 25 percent of Americans live in rural places like Albany, but only about 10percent of physicians practice in those areas. And as more and more country doctors retire, the rural health-care shortage grows, because so few newly minted physicians have been willing to fill their shoes. Albany’s only hospital, the nonprofit, 25-bed Northwest Medical Center, used to employ a full-time recruiter who advertised and sent out mailers to lure health-care providers from midwestern cities like Omaha, Kansas City, and St. Louis. Response was tepid.
“You pretty much took what you could get,” says John W. Richmond, who retired last year as Northwest Medical Center’s president and CEO. “I mean, it’s kind of like sex if you haven’t had any in a long time. You’re in a bar and it’s 1:30; they just keep getting better-looking.”
All told, about a dozen physicians agreed to give Albany a try. Some, Richmond confides, turned out to have spotty résumés or shaky work habits. Few lasted long. “They’d give you a lot of reasons why they didn’t want to stay,” he says, “but when it came down to it, they didn’t like the rural lifestyle.”
By 2000, Albany’s hospital had become so short-staffed that registered nurses like Donna Walter were putting in 24-hour shifts. “We were exhausted…