Health care providers and trainees from throughout the region and state gathered Thursday to celebrate National Rural Health Day and have a job fair.
The events took place at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center Academic Building. About 175 people attended the National Rural Health Day celebration, not including the job fair.
Dr. Adrian Billings, associate academic dean, rural and community engagement division, said the idea came about because he was invited to speak last year at a national rural health event in Illinois and wanted to have one in Odessa.
Billings wanted to have their own event where they could advocate for rural health care.
“The whole idea was to bring in these 18 healthcare organizations that agreed to take time out of their whole day to travel up here. We have representatives from Del Rio to the Big Bend to north of here that came in trying to recruit our trainees,” Billings said.
“We invited all of our TTUHSC nursing, physician assistant, physical therapy, medical students, all of our resident physicians from all the different departments and healthcare training students from Sul Ross State University. Their nursing students came; Odessa College, Midland College and University Texas Permian Basin were invited to the recruitment fair,” he added.
The aim is to try to augment rural health care, highlight the need for it and show what Texas Tech is trying to do to support rural health care, rural medical education and draw rural students back home.
Billings noted that Texas Tech health sciences has several regional campuses, but the Permian Basin represents the most frontier list of health professional shortage areas.
“We really are and we want to continue to be the flagship rural healthcare campus that if a nursing student, or a PA student, or medical student or a resident wants to experience real health care, we want to enable that here. … They’re taking care of rural patients that are transferred in critically at Medical Center Hospital from all of our rural hospitals. But we want to get them out there in these rural communities and experience rural health care,” Billings said.
The hope is that this will turn into an annual event.
Dr. John Henderson, President-CEO of the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals, was the keynote speaker.
Henderson said he scrapped his prepared remarks and showcased his rural health care heroes instead.
“Mine was less technical and more just human stories about people that make a difference and then I challenged the students, especially, to go try to do something like that with their career,” Henderson said.
