rural health

Parents, educators, and elected officials agree that investing in school-based prevention efforts could help curb the rising rate of youth drug overdoses. The well-known DARE program is one likely choice, but its effectiveness is in question.

Like much of rural America, LaFayette, Alabama, has no hospital or urgent care clinic. As the town's two primary care doctors approach retirement, some experiments are bubbling up to care for people.

For rural Americans, who live in areas often short of mental health services and die by suicide at a far higher rate than urbanites, the federally mandated crisis phone line is one of the few options to connect with a crisis counselor.

State attorneys general vowed the funds would go toward tackling the addiction crisis. But as with the tobacco payouts of the 1990s, local officials have started using them to fill budget shortfalls.

Efforts to improve addiction care in jails and prisons are underway across the country. But a rural Alabama county with one of the nation’s highest overdose rates shows how change is slow.

As three years of pandemic stress accelerated an ongoing nationwide mental health crisis, peer respite programs diverted patients from overburdened ERs, psychiatric institutions and behavioral therapists.

On Tuesday, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act began, requiring employers to provide “reasonable accommodations.” But the new law has a big hole.

As evidence supporting medication treatment for opioid addiction mounts, judges, district attorneys and law enforcement officials in rural America are increasingly open to it after years of insisting on abstinence only.

Non-Hispanic Black women — regardless of income or education level — die at nearly three times the rate of non-Hispanic white women.

They offer basic care traditionally provided by dentists, but opposition from interest groups and the profession’s relative newness mean more than two-thirds of states don’t yet have them.