Have you ever thought about a career in small and rural hospitals?

Abstract

Not much appears in the published literature describing pharmacy practice in small and rural hospitals.1–4 Pharmacy practice in such settings can prove professionally satisfying, and living in a rural area can prove personally rewarding. The terms small hospital and rural hospital often evoke the image of a one-pharmacist operation in the middle of nowhere. The Indian Health Service may designate such a facility as an “isolated duty station.”5 The Health Resources and Services Administration defines small hospitals as having no more than 49 licensed beds and critical access hospitals as having no more than 25 beds.6 The 2006 American Hospital Association database of U.S. hospitals revealed that just under one third of the 6280 respondent hospitals in the United States officially qualified as small hospitals, while just over half of the hospitals in the country had fewer than 100 beds and might consider themselves “small.”7 Rural has been defined several ways,8 none of which is entirely accurate. The designation of rural versus nonrural is often a matter of personal perspective.