Rural Health and Hospitals
Rural and critical access hospitals are vital not only to their communities, but to the entire health care system in Colorado. CHA is committed to supporting its members in rural and frontier areas, and emphasizes building a sustainable future for rural hospitals and the communities they serve.
Re-Imagining Leadership: A Pathway for Rural Health to Thrive in a COVID-19 World
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a number of fractures in the health care system, but none as stark as those facing rural communities. In order to develop a meaningful plan to assist rural health care systems, CHA sought the insight and guidance of those on the frontlines within rural communities, including hospital administrators, clinicians and public health experts. With the help of these peers, CHA and its partners have distilled dozens of personal interviews, extensive literature review and an analysis of rural health care data into an emergency response playbook for rural health care delivery systems – Re-Imagining Leadership: A Pathway for Rural Health to Thrive in a COVID-19 World. CHA was proud to partner with the Eugene S. Farley, Jr. Health Policy Center at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus on this playbook, which was made possible by generous funding from the ZOMA Foundation and CPSI.
Rural Health Care Delivery System Assessment Tool
This assessment tool was created and designed to provide transformational rural health care and community leaders a comprehensive and systematic approach to examine their local health care systems. This resource can be used as both a self-assessment and as a way to compare one system or community to another, sharing information with both parties. It allows leaders to assess the local health care delivery system across five domains impacting efficiency and effectiveness, including Governance and Leadership, Community Engagement, Financial Health, Clinical Care, and Emergency Preparedness and Resilience.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Grant Project
In 2018, CHA applied for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s “Building Trust and Mutual Respect to Improve Health Care” program and received funding to evaluate the role of hospital-based patient and family engagement strategies in building trust with rural communities. As part of this two-year project, CHA, in coordination with the University of Colorado Center for Bioethics and Humanities, administered the Communication Climate Assessment Tool (C-CAT) to six rural hospitals. CHA took the learnings from the six in-depth surveys it conducted with rural member hospitals and distilled them into this new toolkit, which can be implemented in any hospital statewide.