Eastern AHEC Rural Health Immersion - Student Reflections: Christina Kontogiannis
Healthy Acadia has served as Maine’s Eastern Area Health Education Center (AHEC) since 2023. Our service area includes Washington, Hancock, Waldo, and Knox counties.
Maine AHECs provide community-based clinical training experiences to health professions students; encourage Maine youth to pursue careers in the health professions; offer training and continuing education programs to practicing health professionals; and develop public health approaches to address current and emerging community needs.
As part of this program, Healthy Acadia and community partners work together to create rural health immersion opportunities for health professions students to learn more about rural and underserved communities, including Rural Health Immersions (RHI) for Care for the Underserved Pathways (CUP) AHEC Scholars. and community-based experiential learning opportunities for non-CUP scholars.
We will periodically publish guest blog posts from AHEC Scholars who chose to share their experience with the program.
Guest post contributed by Christina Kontogiannis, UNE COM Student. Christina participated in our October 2023 RHI and reflects on the experience.
The first stop of our morning was to visit Northern Light Blue Hill Hospital, which is located in the town of Blue Hill and serves the entire Blue Hill Peninsula. Upon arrival, we were greeted by Dr. Murnik and Fred Watters, FNP, who took us on a tour of the hospital, showed us a little bit of Blue Hill, and explained some of the unique benefits and challenges they find while providing care in this region. Dr. Murnik showed us around the newly constructed hospital, he showed us their emergency room, other in-patient areas, and where they perform their CTs and MRIs.
I knew that the areas that we were visiting on our tour would be rural and smaller, however, I was still shocked by how small the hospital actually was. It has only 10 in-patient beds and 5 beds in the ED. Dr. Murnik told us that their initial plan was to fight for 25, but their board only wanted to allot them 5, which is how they settled 15 beds, I was shocked that any board could possibly pitch such a low bed number for any hospital, no matter how rural.
Dr. Murnik also told us that they were usually completely full, which goes to show that 5 beds would’ve caused major problems for the rural residents in the area. We also saw the primary care clinic located across from the hospital. My favorite aspect of this clinic was the area that offered weekly fresh and free produce to the community, located directly in their primary care office. I think that this is a wildly creative way to encourage fresh and local produce for patients who may not have access to it, whether it be for lack of transportation or money.
I noticed that throughout both the hospital and clinic, Dr. Murnik knew every single person working, from the doctors to the medical assistants, and stopped to introduce us and chat with each member. There was an immediate feeling of close-knit community and a well-bonded, team approach to medicine. While we toured the facilities, we also had the opportunity to speak with Fred Watters, FNP, who does work with palliative care and hospice patients, and does home visits for patients - it’s so rare these days.
He told us that sometimes he will see only 3-4 patients in a day because he is traveling through such a vast and sparsely populated area to get to each patient. I honestly did not know there were still healthcare providers this type of deeply personalized care and I found Fred’s life and work extremely interesting!
After we left Blue Hill, we travelled four minutes down the road to meet Anne Schroth and Vanessa Hatch, who were employees at Healthy Peninsula. They explained to us some different social programs they have for the residents of Blue Hill peninsula, programs like the Magic School Bus, which is a produce truck that provides weekly, fresh produce to 13 different locations throughout the Blue Hill Peninsula region.
What was extremely interesting to me about these programs was the role of physicians in community outreach. I feel like a lot of the program population is found through local primary care offices, which see the patients most often. It further shows that as a rural physician you must wear many hats, you have less access to specialists, and you must be a gateway for patients in need of receiving social services offered within the community.
After Healthy Peninsula, we travelled to King Hill Farms in Penobscot, where we were greeted by Paul Schultz, one of the farm owners. When we arrived, they were rapidly trying to harvest the rest of their carrots before the tropical storm rolled in. Paul kindly took time from his preparations and explained how he provided the produce I saw earlier in the primary care office at Blue Hill, and other areas he sources to as well. Something that I found very interesting is that he directly provides produce to 30 different families in the area who buy weekly produce from him, this is not something you see often in less rural areas!
The final place we visited was a primary care office in Castine where we also stopped for lunch and toured the area. Once again, Dr. Murnik somehow knew everyone not only in the clinic at Castine, but also at the various stores around town.
When we arrived, there was a physician there celebrating her very last day of employment after having worked at this clinic for 28 years. She told us that after working in one area for so long, her patients felt like her family. There are families within the community that she has seen members spanning four generations as patients, which is insane! I could tell that she truly loved the work she did as a rural primary care clinician through just our short meeting, and I found her very inspiring.
Overall, I think we were really able to see the community feel that present throughout rural medicine, but we were also able to see some of its limitations.
I look forward to seeing what else this weekend has in store!
