Shortage of doctors impacts rural ERs
A chronic shortage of doctors is forcing rural hospitals to "be creative," as one expert put it, to keep their emergency rooms alive. In this case, the answer was to hire other medical professionals and put them on the front lines.
In many rural emergency rooms, physician assistants and nurse practitioners do much of what doctors do — diagnose and treat patients. That's legal as long as they have a doctor's supervision. In Waseca, local doctors serve as backup, mostly by phone.
"Yes, in an ideal world, we'd love to have a well trained specialist in every situation," Ira Moscovice, director of the University of Minnesota's Rural Health Research Center, told the Star Tribune. "In this case, I think it's a good trade-off."
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