Petersburg’s hospital has received three major grants as part of the federal Rural Health Transformation Program, a new five-year program meant to improve rural healthcare across the U.S. In its first year, the state of Alaska has received $272 million to award to projects that meet specific healthcare–related goals.
The state has been releasing grant projects every Friday. So far, the Petersburg Medical Center has been notified they will receive three grants for a combined total of over a million dollars. But contracts must be signed with the state before the exact amounts are finalized.
One $159,000 grant will help expand the hospital’s maternal and early childhood health programs. The hospital does not offer birthing services, but the funding will help develop programs for lactation and childbirth education.
“There’s a lot of care involved in a pre and post delivery, from expectant mothers to new mothers,” said hospital CEO Phil Hofstetter. “A lot of care goes into case management and lactation consulting. Things of that nature, I think, we want to be able to expand.”
A second $446,000 grant will help expand the hospital’s telehealth offerings, and a third $437,000 grant will grow the behavioral health program.
“Those are really instrumental in some of the care services and sort of gaps I think that we have in a community, and that we’ve been investing quite a bit on,” Hofstetter said.
He said these projects will likely have some overlap. Right now, the hospital’s existing behavioral health department already uses telehealth.
“The telehealth model really is about bringing a hybrid of inpatient coupled with remote or telehealth services,” he said. “For example, we have psychiatrist Dr. Sonkiss through behavioral health that has been coming to do clinics periodically, and then has telehealth appointments.”
Hofstetter said the hospital can use that model to help offer other telehealth services in the future.
Hospital Director of Grants Katie Bryson said the award amounts are preliminary.
She said the hospital will have until the end of next June to spend the money. That’s a tight timeline, so all of the grants build on work that the hospital has already begun and can realistically continue.
“It is both capable of transforming access to care, but also rooted in work we are ready to hit the ground doing,” she said. “Because we knew that timeline when we proposed the projects, we knew that the projects needed to be complete.”
Bryson said rural healthcare providers want to provide more services to their communities, and this rural healthcare funding will make a big difference.
“In rural and remote Alaskan communities, the difficulty is not usually the will or the knowledge that an area of healthcare is important. Usually, remote and rural providers are trying to offer these services,” she said. “It’s often a question of do you have the resources, the training, the availability to bring contracts in, the support to cover travel costs or to launch projects? And that’s really what the RHTP funding is able to help us do.”
Rural Health Transformation Project grants are still being distributed by the state.
