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https://www.wvlt.tv/2024/05/06/healthcare-crunch-east-tennessee-communities-fight-keep-rural-hospitals/

ONEIDA, Tenn. (WVLT) - Big South Fork Medical is up and running on a Wednesday in 2024.

Years ago, that sentence would have been hit or miss as the hospital has battled missteps in its past.

”We’re it, the hospital, over the years, has closed for a number of different reasons, and the strain that puts on the ambulance service for instance is incredible,” said Hal Leftwich, the CEO of Big South Fork.

Leftwich has run the hospital for nearly five years now.


He has worked in the healthcare industry for more than four decades, nearly all of them spent working someway with rural hospitals.

”Rural healthcare has always been more difficult,” said Leftwich.

Big South Fork operates with a full-time staff of roughly 75 and a full and part-time staff of about 115.

Daily, Leftwich runs on a budget of $40,000, eclipsing more than $14,000,000 a year.


”Small rural hospitals are wonderful; it’s friends and neighbors taking care of friends and neighbors,” said Lefwich.

Big South Fork has battled its past demons, finding ways to use beds for emergency care and long term care, while partnering with the University of Tennessee Medical Center and becoming a critical care access hospital, a way to keep money flowing, and the need constant in a county of 22,000.

”If you can’t provide those services locally to at least get people into the system and stabilized and manage their care, it makes it much more difficult for the big hospital and the little hospital,” said Leftwich.

An hour away a trip up U.S. 27, along Kentucky 92 and south down I-75 sits the building that once housed Jellico Community Hospital.


”Rural hospitals is one of the four cornerstones of the community,” said Campbell County Mayor Jack Lynch.

Lynch is in a unique position, his county, at one point, had two hospitals, one on the north end and one on the south end.

Today, his county has one, and it’s run by a larger health system.

”I find that every time a community hospital closes, it means that they have to travel 25 miles that they have to travel on average for emergency care,” said Mayor Lynch.


A 2024 study by the Tennessee Health Care Campaign shows between 2010 and 2021, Tennessee experienced 22 hospitals closing, the majority of them in rural counties.

Jellico sits on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee and is also sectioned off from the rest of the county it’s located in by Cumberland Mountain.

When Jellico Community Hospital closed again, and this time for good, for now, it forced people living in north Campbell County, Southern Whitley and parts of McCreary County to have to drive nearly 30 minutes away for the nearest emergency care.

From Jellico, the closest Emergency rooms are in Corbin, Kentucky and Lafollette.


”You start thinking ‘What if my grandparents get sick?’ You don’t realize how lucky you are to have it minutes away,” said 5th District County Commissioner Tyler King.

King is one of three county commissioners elected to serve Jellico on the county commission. He was born at Jellico Community Hospital and worked there in the mid 2010's.

He now works for the county, but he is experiencing first-hand the impact of losing the hospital is having on its people.

Without Jellico Community Hospital, the region has little lab care, little specialty care, and now has nowhere close for expecting mothers to go, driving them to Knoxville often, as Lafollette doesn’t have OB care, and Baptist Health Corbin doesn’t take Tennessee Insurance, according to King.


The county commissioner is hoping the state takes a renewed look at Medicaid expansion, believing that could spell an influx of much needed insurance dollars into a community like Jellico, allowing its community hospital to stay afloat.

”I see their point,” said King. “They have to make money to operate, but then you also have to take into account lives mean more than dollars, people mean more than money.”

Jellico Community Hospital is owned by the City of Jellico.

WVLT News reached out to the Mayor of Jellico for the story, but she didn’t return our requests.

Mayor Lynch vows he would support Jellico in any way it needs.

”I personally want healthcare. I don’t care about the profit; I want healthcare,” said Mayor Lynch.

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