A Question of Rural Sustainability

The Duke Endowment supported parish nurse programs in rural churches to help improve access to health services.

Insights

While parish nurse programs appear to be promising and helpful to church members, they face hurdles as they work to become fixtures in rural church life.

Rural parish nurse programs need to show documented outcomes, such as health improvements among congregations and cost savings to community health systems and patients. Without evidence of such outcomes, these programs risk decreasing support.

Rural parish nurse programs may need to grow to include more education and prevention or to shift their focus to preventative care. This would allow for more ways in which to demonstrate measurable outcomes and impact.

Sustainability is a continuing challenge to rural parish nurse programs. The issues listed above can have a negative impact on long-term funding from public and private sources. But other economic issues come into play. In the Duke Divinity School dual-degree program, for example, low enrollment was caused in part by the lack of feasible employment opportunities for parish nurses  upon graduation. To overcome this obstacle, more rural parish nurse positions need to grow from part-time to full-time jobs.

Sustainability also depends on finding the right balance of funding sources. The most promising approach may be sharing the cost of a parish nurse program equally between the rural church in which the program is housed and a local or regional hospital.

Contact Us

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Director of Rural Church
704.927.2251