Tackling the Crisis in Rural Health: Nurse-Led Clinics, Community Activism, and the Politics of Rural Health in the 1970s

Kate Hurd Mead Lecture - Tackling the Crisis in Rural Health: Nurse-Led Clinics, Community Activism, and the Politics of Rural Health in the 1970s.  

About the Talk:  

In the 1970s, as health care leaders and policymakers grappled with how to resolve the structural inequities in access to health care services in rural areas and worsening rural health disparities, nurse-led rural health clinics emerged as a potential solution to the rural health care crisis. In 1974, for example, the Champlain Islands Health Center opened in the small rural community of Grand Isle County, Vermont. Established as a collaboration between community leaders and the Visiting Nurses Association and with funding from the federal rural health initiative program, the nurse practitioner-led clinic provided accessible primary care services to a predominantly White low-income rural community.  In 1976, a congressional committee hailed the Champlain Islands Health Center as a success story and model for rural health care delivery. The health center’s success, and that of other nurse-led rural health clinics, helped generate support for passage of the Rural Health Clinic Services Act in 1977, which reformed both the provision and financing of rural health care. Despite this, the Champlain Islands Health Center was forced to close in the early 1980s, as federal funding priorities shifted under the Reagan Administration. Using the Champlain Islands Health Center as a case study, this talk will provide insights into the importance of nurse-led innovation, community health activism, and the entangled policies and politics of rural health care in the 1970s. 

This event is co-sponsored by The Section on Medical History of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the Legacy Center of Drexel University College of Medicine (DUCOM) 

Event Timeline: 

5:30 PM – Doors Open 

6:00 PM – Lecture Begins 

7:00 PM – Light Reception and Networking 

About the Speaker: 

Dominique Tobbell, PhD 

Centennial Distinguished Professor and Director, Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry, University of Virginia School of Nursing 

Dr. Tobbell is a historian of nursing and health care whose research examines the complex political, economic, and social relationships that developed among academic institutions, governments, and the health care industry in the decades after World War II and assesses the implications of those relationships for the current health care system.  She is the author of three books, including, most recently, Dr. Nurse: Science, Politics, and the Transformation of American Nursing (University of Chicago Press, 2022). She has been the recipient of several awards, fellowships, and grants including from the American Philosophical Society and the American Association for the History of Nursing.  Dr. Tobbell earned an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of Manchester, and both a PhD in the history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania. 

About Kate Hurd Mead:

An 1888 graduate of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead was a successful physician, leader and organizer of medical women, medical writer, lecturer and supporter of the work of women doctors everywhere. Following her internship in Boston, studies at Johns Hopkins University and in Europe, she served as medical director at the Bryn Mawr School for Girls in Baltimore, where she also helped establish a dispensary for working women. 

She entered private practice in Middletown, Connecticut and attended the town’s hospital. But it was her determination to tell the whole story of women’s place in medicine, resulting in the incomparable History of Women in Medicine from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Nineteenth-Century (1938) that became her legacy. Dr. Hurd-Mead completed the manuscript of Volume 2, updating the pioneers of the entire eastern hemisphere from Australia to Ireland and a third volume, covering the western hemisphere was underway at her death. 

NOTE: By entering the event premises, you consent to photography, audio recording, video recording, and its release, publication, exhibition, or reproduction to be used for news, promotional purposes, advertising, inclusion on websites, social media, or any other purpose by The College of Physicians/The Mütter Museum and its affiliates and representatives.