Nearly 1 in 5 Americans live in rural areas and depend on their local hospital for care. Over the past 10 years, 133 of those hospitals have closed.
More than 30 states have seen at least one rural hospital shut down since 2010, and the closures are heavily clustered in the South, according to data from the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.
Listed below are the 16 rural hospitals that have closed this year, as tracked by the Sheps Center. For the purposes of its analysis, the Sheps Center defined a hospital closure as the cessation in the provision of inpatient services.
"We follow the convention of the Office of Inspector General that a closed hospital is 'a facility that stopped providing general, short-term, acute inpatient care,'" reads a statement on the Sheps Center's website. "We did not consider a hospital closed if it: merged with, or was sold to, another hospital but the physical plant continued to provide inpatient acute care, converted to critical access status, or both closed and reopened during the same calendar year and at the same physical location."
As of Oct. 29, all the facilities listed below had stopped providing inpatient care. However, some of them still offered other services, including outpatient care, emergency care, urgent care or primary care.
1. Bluefield (W.Va.) Regional Medical Center
*Provides urgent or emergency care
2. Central Hospital of Bowie (Texas)
3. Cumberland River Hospital (Celina, Tenn.)
4. Decatur County General Hospital (Parsons, Tenn.)
5. Edward W. McCready Memorial Hospital (Crisfield, Md.)
*Provides urgent or emergency care
6. Mayo Clinic Health System-Springfield (Minn.)
*Provides outpatient/primary care
7. Mountain View Regional Hospital (Norton, Va.)
*Operates as a nursing or rehabilitation facility
8. Pinnacle Regional Hospital (Boonville, Mo.)
9. Shands Lake Shore Regional Medical Center (Lake City, Fla.)
10. Shands Live Oak (Fla.) Regional Medical Center
*Provides urgent or emergency care
11. Shands Starke (Fla.) Regional Medical Center
*Provides urgent or emergency care
12. Southwest Georgia Regional Medical Center (Cuthbert)
13. St. Luke's Cushing Hospital (Leavenworth, Kan.)
*Provides urgent or emergency care
14. Sumner Community Hospital (Wellington, Kan.)
15. UPMC Susquehanna Sunbury (Pa.)
*Provides outpatient/primary care
16. Williamson (W.Va.) Memorial Hospital