Rural Palliative Care: Karl Bezak, Jeanie Youngwerth, Adie Goldberg, and Gregg Vandekieft

Rural populations in the United States face unique healthcare challenges. These communities tend to be older, have higher mortality rates, and experience higher rates of chronic conditions and physical disabilities compared to urban populations. Despite the increased need for palliative care in rural areas, access remains alarmingly limited. Even in hospital settings, where palliative care programs are more common in urban areas, only 35% of rural hospitals report having such programs, compared to 81% of urban hospitals.

In this week’s podcast, we explore the challenges and opportunities of delivering palliative care in rural communities with our esteemed guests Karl Bezak, Jeanie Youngwerth, Adie Goldberg, and Gregg Vandekieft. We begin by discussing what inspired each of them to focus on rural palliative care. From there, we dive into what rural palliative care looks like and examine how it differs from care provided in urban settings. Our guests also share insights into the challenges of delivering this care in resource-limited rural environments and explore innovative strategies to ensure patients and families receive the support they need (like providing remote fellowship training for docs living in rural areas!).

We also tackle the role of telemedicine in rural palliative care, both the good part, connecting patients in remote areas with specialists who might otherwise be unavailable, and the bad part, the huge digital divide seen in rural areas. 

Join us for what I thought were some valuable insights our guests brought on how we can better serve rural populations and create a more equitable system for palliative care delivery. And if you want to learn more, check out some of these resources:

• University of Colorado’s Community Hospice and Palliative Medicine (CHPM) Fellowship, which allows mid-career providers to obtain training while continuing to live and work in their community supported through online and distance learning technology

• Master of Science in Palliative Care Program: Master of Science Degree

• The Rural Health Information Hub’s Rural Hospice and Palliative Care Overview 

• Stratis Health’s Rural Community-based Palliative Care resource center

• The Washington Rural Palliative Care Initiative website

• CAPC’s Safety-Net and Rural Care website        

• The paper validating the AI Algorithm used to identify patient in rural ED for the TeleGOC Pause Model at UPMC (SafeNET) 

• A Google Site where Karl is hosting their most recent data related to the TeleGOC Pause Model