One-tenth of hospitals in the rural U.S. South shuttered between 2007 and 2018, according to a recent study published in The Milbank Quarterly.
Researchers from the Chapel Hill-based University of North Carolina sought to quantify the change in this region's hospital supply, accounting for closures, mergers and conversions. In a study, they quantified spatial hospital accessibility for Black and Latino communities — the populations most at risk for adverse outcomes following hospital outcomes.
Seventy-two rural counties in the South had at least one hospital close between 2007 and 2018, bringing the region's total hospital supply from 783 to 653. Over 11 years, nearly half, or 49.1 percent, of census areas had diminished access to a hospital.
Thirty-three counties lost their last remaining hospital to closure, and about 6 million people experienced worsened travel time to their nearest hospital, the study concluded. Rural areas with a higher concentration of Black and Latino residents had longer travel times to their nearest acute care hospital.
"Thinking more explicitly about time — time inequity and scarcity borne by Black and non-Black people of color and low-income people — will help us better understand patterns of healthcare utilization and health behaviors more broadly," wrote Arrianna Marie Planey, PhD, the study's first author and an assistant professor of health policy and management at the university. "This requires understanding that there are fundamental social and spatialized inequities in the organization of healthcare in the U.S."