Rural Peril

Licensed practical nurse Kim Neuhalfen is scared about what the future holds. Mostly for her patients, sure, but also for the setting that she’s come to love in some ways more than all the others.

After an “excruciating” experience closing a rural skilled nursing facility, Kimberly Green, chief operating officer for the Diakonos Group, is warning that more providers will face a cascade of similar...

As hundreds of nursing homes have shuttered in the last few years, the very strategies meant to prop up the sector have often left the most isolated, resource-strapped facilities with nothing gained.

Questions remain about how much providers will be able to rely on telehealth, remote monitoring and other technologies to come in the years ahead — and whether the government will make the needed legal,...

In August, Candace Carey left her job of eight years — monitoring eggs at a nearby chicken farm for nearly $18 an hour — and took a pay cut to watch over and tend to human beings instead as a CNA.

The plight of rural nursing homes has been forewarned for a while, with little improvement. But now the pandemic, followed by the threat of a federal staffing mandate, is expediting what seems to be a...

Like many of its skilled nursing neighbors in the Cornhusker State, Good Samaritan Society-Bloomfield is teetering between fulfilling its vital community role with special small-town flourishes and succumbing...