This week has been bustling for Northwest AHEC and the Office of Rural Health (ORH), with three site visits to the State Designated Rural Health Centers! Our partnership with SDRHC and ORH ensures top-notch primary healthcare for all residents in their communities. At NWAHEC, we're delighted to collaborate with these organizations, which truly strive to address the needs of their communities. A big thanks to Grace Clinic in Elkin, Surry Medical Ministries in Mt Airy and Hugh Chatham in Ronda and of course, working with the ORH team is always a pleasure.

Building on the 2022 Annual Celebration of Rural Nursing, this year’s conference will focus on key topics that cover demographics from the infant to end-of-life healthcare spectrum for each generation. Content experts will discuss topics relevant to prevention and compassionate care for rural health disparities across the lifecycle. Program education topics will include: Infant mortality, adverse childhood experiences (ACES), suicide prevention for youth and adults, advance care directives, and hospice & palliative care.

Join us on June 2, 2023 / 8:30 am–12:45 pm at Hawthorne Inn / Winston-Salem, NC

One of Northwest AHEC's practices in located in Catawba County recently received a training from Practice Support staff on Managing Difficult Patient Situations. Practice Administrator for Newton Family Physicians P.A., Melissa White,  commended our staff and services "NWAHEC is a valuable resource for us and recently assisted us in some valuable training for my staff."

Three years after the world shut down and forced a stay-at-home order due to COVID-19 pandemic response, Northwest AHEC is looking back and REFLECTING on what we have learned.

The 5th Annual NC AHEC Statewide Celebration of Rural Health Nursing Conference will take place via Live Webinar on November 4th.

Dr. John Tinga practiced Obstetrics in eastern North Carolina for 40 years and delivered over 8,000 babies. We recently had him on our Healthcare Insights Podcast where he talks about his training, the challenges with rural medicine, his experience with AHEC, and shares his insights on the joys and challenges of medical practice.

The Wake Forest Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) Program in Community-Engaged Research (PCER) published an important paper outlining proceedings from the Appalachian Translational Research Network (ATRN) Health Summit that was hosted in September 2020. Northwest Area Health Education Center partnered to provide the Summit which brought together 141 attendees, making it a very successful virtual conference during the pandemic.

Northwest AHEC Practice Support would like to celebrate great work going on in its seventeen-county region. Grace Clinic of Yadkin Valley in Elkin, NC was one of six Free and Charitable Clinics nationally that received funding from grantee: Becton, Dickenson and Company (NYSE:BDX) to provide multi-year diagnostic testing.  This initiative which began in 2017 is called Point of Care, Enhancing Clinical Effectiveness (PoCECE) program.  The PoCECE program provides a Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendment (CLIA) waived point-of-care test system consisting of instruments, reagents and quality control to perform the following tests: Cholesterol, LDL, HDL, Triglycerides, Macroscopic Urinalysis, Microalbumin, INR, Hemoglobin A1c, Strep A, HIV, Rapid Hepatitis C, Pregnancy, Flu A & B, and RSV.  The grants also include technical support consisting of standard operating procedures, equipment setup and configuration, competency training and documentation.¹