Dr. Beatty Comments on Rural Health Department Accreditation

Dr. Kate Beatty, Interim Director of Research for East Tennessee State University College of Public Health’s Center for Rural Health Research and Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Services Management and Policy, was invited to contribute to the Rural Health Information Hub article, “It’s Possible: Voluntary Accreditation for Rural Health Departments.”

Dr. Beatty discussed avoiding stigma by balancing the community’s public health needs with accreditation requirements.  She noted when a rural local health department offers more clinical services and less other essential services, an accreditation barrier can result.  She believes that pulling out of those clinical services might leave a community vulnerable.

“Our research indicates that the amount of clinical services offered by a health department does influence the choice of pursuing accreditation,” Beatty said. “In my opinion, for those small and rural public health departments, I think there’d be some ethical implications if they’re the only provider doing clinical care and found they had to eliminate that work in order to seek accreditation. Stepping back and considering that the clinical care done by the rural health department is actually meeting the needs of their community — what public health work is meant to do — you have to think about this in the face of accreditation.”

Dr. Beatty mentioned her recent research on factors that influence whether a rural local health department will seek accreditation and additional barriers the researchers identified.

“There are a lot of health departments especially in rural communities that don’t have the capacity to go through accreditation,” she said. “Through my field experiences, I’ve seen that there are great health departments doing great work, but they’re just unable to attempt accreditation. However, they are very connected to their communities and to their community partners. They know what they can do, they’ve identified what they need to do. It’s important to not stigmatize those departments as a low-functioning health department just because they are unable to take on accreditation at this time.”