Nancy Bell has been named President of the Virginia Rural Health Association (VRHA), a nonprofit devoted to improving the health of rural Virginians through education, advocacy, and fostering cooperative partnerships. It’s a membership organization consisting of adult professionals and students on a health career path. The current focus of the VRHA is on workforce development, equity, and advocacy.
Bell, who is Population Health Manager for the West Piedmont Health District (WPHD), said she will be working closely with executive director Beth O’Connell, her staff, and the Board of Directors from many fields associated with rural health including hospitals, social services, public health professionals, university personnel, and other people who are committed to improving rural health outcomes. She will also chair monthly board meetings, review financials, evaluate staff, and look for funding opportunities.
From life expectancy to maternal mortality, Americans living in rural regions face some of the greatest health care challenges in the country. Bell said that dwindling resources are a major concern in the WPHD which covers Franklin, Henry, and Patrick counties.
“In the West Piedmont Health District there are only two hospitals, and they don’t deliver babies,” she said. “Maternal health and infant mortality resources are one of the challenges we are working on by seeking funds for doulas and other resources.”
Bell said rural communities face other challenges like having ample emergency services, transportation in general, and opioid addiction is prominent.
“Hospitals are leaving rural communities across Virginia, unable to be profitable,” she said. “Physicians and other practitioners generally do not choose a rural area to start their careers, so we have fewer physicians per resident than other areas of the state.”
Bell, who began her term in January, said that maternal health will be a pet project, and she hopes to have some kind of pilot project underway soon. She is working with the VHRA to address the fact that no delivery hospital exists in the entire health district. She said doulas are being trained and deployed to assist expectant mothers in finding prenatal and postnatal care.
She is also concerned about the aging population, and chronic health issues like diabetes and heart disease, and said more resources are needed to assist people with these conditions. Bell said the entire district also suffers from a lack of public transportation, and that is another concern with many older residents not being able to drive. She said that she is working with the VHRA on workforce development to address these matters as well.
Bell added that another goal is to help people in rural areas to understand that addiction is not as a failure of character but a mental health disorder.
Rural health has been the focus of Bell’s work since she joined the Virginia Department of Health in 2016. She has been responsible for leading community health assessments and improvement planning aimed at the needs of rural citizens and for implementing grant-funded programs to address those needs.
Bell remains optimistic about the future of rural healthcare and said Covid is responsible for a lot of positive changes.
“Rallying municipal, hospital and other partners created strong working relationships that we now rely upon for day-to-day activities, as do they,” she said. “We created new ways of doing things that I feel are more cost and time efficient, like online meetings and some procedures, and new tools were developed, like dashboards, making healthcare data easy for the public to access. Funding from the federal government and passed down through the Virginia Department of Health, enabled us to hire community health workers, and I believe these positions will be instrumental in the future.”
Bell believes that the successful health departments are the ones that are turning themselves inside out, taking more programs and services to people where they are.
“The community health assessments and improvement plans that we lead, inform advancements identified by the people who live there so that programs and services are what they need and not what we think they need.”
Bell is a graduate of Radford University (BA, 1982) and Duke University’s Nonprofit Management program (2010).
