Duplin County’s diagnosis: medically underserved

You need only try to make a doctor’s appointment in Duplin County to know that it’s a community that’s underserved when it comes to healthcare. Whether it’s for a runny nose or the flu or COVID, it can take days and sometimes weeks to be seen by a healthcare provider. But there are people within the county’s healthcare system who are working to change that.

Cheryl Hooks, for example, was born and bred in Rose Hill, and recently graduated from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill as a certified nurse practitioner. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Hooks never wanted to live and work anywhere other than Duplin County. She and Dr. Michael Ward are now seeing primary care patients at ECU Health’s Multispecialty Clinic in Kenansville.

A cosmetologist for 20 years, Hooks longed to become a nurse, and finally took that chance. “I always wanted to go back to school to be a nurse practitioner, and be able to serve in that capacity in my community,” she said. “That was always my ultimate goal.”

Though she worked in the emergency room at ECU Health Duplin Hospital for eight years, Hooks’ heart was always in primary care. It will take more people like Hooks for Duplin County to overcome its primary care provider shortage.

“We see a lot of primary care patients in the emergency room, because we have a shortage of primary care providers,” said Laura Maready, director of marketing and development for ECU Health Duplin Hospital.

“A lot of people, even if they have a primary care provider, because of the fact that there are so few in our county, they get inundated with patients,” Hooks added. “So when they have an acute care need, it’s very hard to get in. A lot of people come into the emergency department with a lot of things that really aren’t emergency care. And you also have a lot of people in the county with no insurance, and they go to the emergency room for that reason.”

Many people also seek primary care at the emergency room, because they’re required to be seen, whether they can pay or not, Maready pointed out, whereas most primary care providers ask for payment up front.

That fills up emergency rooms — and primary care doctor’s offices, as well. With only a handful of primary care doctors in the county, it creates a perfect storm that’s difficult to navigate.

The answer is to be able to successfully recruit more primary care providers. Though she never wanted to practice anywhere else, Hooks admitted, “It’s just very hard to recruit providers of any kind to rural areas.”

In fact, the multispecialty clinic’s practice manager, Kimberly Villanueva, said it took six years to finally get primary care in place there. “We’ve been open since 2017,” she said, “and I think we had two applicants, prior to hiring Dr. Ward and Cheryl.”

Hand in hand with the need for more providers is the need for more education of the public.

Hooks said it was important for kids to start learning about healthcare careers in school. Especially those who are currently in Duplin County. “I feel like people who are from the area are more likely to stay, as opposed to somebody who’s from somewhere else,” she said.

ECU Health and Duplin County Schools have partnered together to provide the Duplin County Health Sciences Academy, which works to get students familiarized with healthcare, Maready explained.

ECU Health has also started sending various teams into the elementary schools, starting at an even earlier age. Maready said, “I think there needs to be more of that, really. Not only trying to recruit those kids, but to educate them, too, so that they are more aware and start to think at an early age about how to live a healthy lifestyle.”

Whatever the symptoms of being underserved, the cure is, in effect, education. “I think it’s important for kids … not only educating them, but putting healthcare workers and healthcare providers in front of them,” Hooks said. “We want to know that there’s someone out there that did it, that came from a similar background that I come from.”

Maready agreed. “In order to increase the number of primary care providers we have, we’ve got to encourage and inspire and make these kids dream that they can do these great jobs, and like Cheryl, want to serve the community.”