The only hospital in rural Pickens County, Ala., closed its doors for good just two weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
It was March 2020. The west Alabama county sits along the Mississippi state line, its landscape dotted with small towns. When the hospital closed in the county seat of Carrollton (pop. 1,000), Pickens County lost four physicians, 150 jobs, at least one freestanding clinic, specialty services like cardiology and neurology, and, of course, its emergency room. The nearest ER is now at least half an hour away.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Pickens County Medical Center became the thirteenth Alabama hospital to shutter in less than a decade, just as other hospitals around the state mobilized to fight the growing epidemic, offering COVID-19 tests in their communities and treating waves of COVID-19 patients.
But Pickens County had a small group of local leaders who foresaw the hollowing out of their healthcare system and had already searched for solutions. A few local family physicians partnered with the county school system and public health researchers from the University of Alabama to open a new kind of school clinic in their medically underserved communities.