Providing access to consistent, quality care in sparsely populated or hard-to-reach places is no easy feat. It involves addressing issues including infrastructure, workforce, funding, and proximity, not to mention tackling problems from hospital closures to the shrinking provider workforce.
In this episode, we’re taking a road trip across the vast state of Texas, a state where 83% of its nearly 270,000 square miles of land is made up of farms, ranches, and forests, with over 4 million people living in these rural areas. At the steering wheel is a nurse practitioner and professor Barbara Chapman DNP, MBA, APRN, FNP-C, NHDP, PMHNP-BC who is committed to using and combining every approach possible, including mobile health care, to address access to care issues not only in rural areas, the places where people are hard to reach and often hardly reached, but also driving toward solutions where everyone, regardless of where they live, has access to the quality, timely, whole-person care they need and deserve.