Building Capacity for Rural Tennessee Advocacy

In response to the steady and harmful loss of Tennessee’s rural hospitals, the Tennessee Health Care Campaign (THCC) developed a partnership with community representatives and academic partners to identify factors that influence these closures and their effects on rural communities. Their goals were to identify innovative strategies to reestablish health care infrastructures, learn lessons that might prevent future closures, and ultimately build a broader advocacy network to respond to the problem. During 2018-20, THCC gathered information from a panel of rural health experts, community listening sessions in six counties representing communities that had lost a hospital or were expected to, and a series of interviews with stakeholders including administrators, patients, and others, we explored the Tennessee hospital closure issue. This report summarizes their findings and offers several policy suggestions.