Grantee Spotlight

Rural Health Network Development Program  

The Georgia Health Policy Center recently spoke to Gail Bullard, project director for the Central Michigan Recovery and Education Network (CMREN), about building partnerships with 27 partners and 54 other agencies and individuals to increase capacity and ensure sustainability of their work through the Rural Health Institute at Ferris State University.

To date, what has been the biggest accomplishment in establishing your network?

Our whole purpose is to decrease substance use disorder mortality and has been since we started this work in 2018. So, overdoses are down in the state of Michigan, but we know rural areas lag. We know that we’re working in that area, in data from 2013 to 2024, a couple of our counties are significantly decreased, while others are staying stable. We know that through emergency room visits with opioid-involved poisoning overdose deaths, but also overdose emergency healthcare visit rate, the visit rate is down, and the deaths are down. And we believe that that may be connected to the fact that in our counties, we have increased Narcan access; we have increased medication assisted treatment access; and we’ve increased access to recovery treatment beds.

What is a tip or early learning you would share with an organization launching a similar network?

The tip is to get people together. We use a collective impact approach, but the biggest thing we do that draws people together is that twice a year, we hold what we call a “Community Conversation Day.” It’s an organized event where all our partners can meet in one gathering place here at the University. We invite people from the community. We have a keynote speaker, one or two panels of experts from our community that speak on a topic, then we – over lunch, post questions and let people just sit, talk, and plan forward. What could we do? What do we need? Then we gather that information together, and our partners help us go through it in our next monthly meeting to decide if there is some low-hanging fruit we can address easily. What are some challenges for us that we can address? By bringing people together and letting them have conversations – network, work together, actually meet people, talk, shake hands, share over lunch or a cup of coffee, conversation. That builds community, and it builds that network. They become working partners instead of competitors.

How do you see participation in the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy’s Network Development Program impacting your broader health improvement efforts?

It allowed us to have time and opportunity to build, expand, and strengthen the network for a common goal. When we wrote the grant, we used two different frameworks as options that we would consider once we moved forward, and they were HRSA’s Rural Centers of Excellence: one was out of the University of Rochester, and the other was the Fletcher Group. So, in our very first meeting, we explained what the grant was about the first hour. Then the second hour we brought in, virtually, representatives from both University of Rochester and Fletcher Group, and had them present what their work is and how they thought they might be able to offer assistance to our CMREN work. We talked a little after those presentations, and then just had a lot to think about, and came back for a second meeting. The Governance Council decided that they wanted Fletcher Group, so we then proceeded to build our strategic plan around working with Fletcher Group’s recovery ecosystem model.

Do you have an example that illustrates the value of planning for a rural health network instead of a single organization at the helm?

We don’t have a medical center at Ferris, so we don’t really offer any of the work that is being done in the community. We’re not a competitor, so we can facilitate these meetings, and through those meetings, we use this collective impact approach that has us present what the team agreed were things that we would work on. As a result of that kind of active engagement, we have had some success, we think great success. One of our counties, early in the grant, realized that they did not have any recovery meetings that were open to people with substance use disorder. They had some alcohol use disorder meetings, but nothing for substance use disorder meetings. That county now has seven nights a week multiple options for recovery meetings. They offer programming there seven days a week. It’s just mushroomed. They’re just active and moving forward, and it’s made a difference in that entire county.

What’s next on the horizon for your grant-funded program?

One of the things we’ve done here at the University is to propose a Rural Health Institute. Our goal is to have a place where we can house work like the CMREN work and the supportive grants that go specifically with that work so that we can help the community. We can build rural health workforce through our programming here that students in any program we have can be involved in the work that we’re doing for substance use disorder – but more so to develop a rural health workforce that understands rural living: what it takes to have health in a rural space; what it takes to build community; and what it takes to identify gaps and address barriers – be it behavioral health, substance use disorder, chronic disease, and beyond.