A Place at the Long Table for Rural Communities

Beacon, February 25, 2025

A few years ago my neighbor lent me a book called Bruno, Chief of Police and it changed my life. It’s the first in a series of delightful novels set fictional village of Saint-Denis in the Périgord region (also called the Dordogne) of Southwest France.  The protagonist, a former soldier turned village police chief, has a profound love for his community and takes you on a journey of joy, reveling in the simple pleasures of rural life, friends, family, and fresh-from-the-farm food. They are my go-to books to read on long flights when I visit my own friends and family in France.

All over the world, people recognize that life in rural areas has a different pace, it has different needs and requirements for a prosperous, healthy, and rewarding life. And meeting those needs in a more and more urbanized world can be a challenge in any country. Like Bruno’s Dordogne, Washington State has similar unique challenges to support our rural communities, especially when it comes to health care.

This year, the Bree evaluation program is particularly interested in learning about the use of best practices in our rural communities. Who is using our guidelines outside of the I-5 corridor? How useful are our recommendations in suburban and rural areas? What are the priorities for rural communities? How can we make sure that our guidelines are providing recommendations that lead to equity in access, care processes, and outcomes for rural areas compared to urban areas?

We have three primary strategies for improving our understanding of the needs of rural Washington Communities. The first is our participation in the Rural health ad hoc workgroup  through the HCA. We hope to learn how the measure we recommend are or are not aligned with our rural communities values and to better understand what health care measures are relevant to them. The aim is to re-assess what measures we recommend to be included in contracts and to provide more support for homegrown measures to assess quality care.

Our second strategy is our reporting initiative, which will run through the end of 2025. The aim of this initiative is to help visualize the “where” of guidelines use. It allows anyone to provide some basic information on the guidelines that their organization have adopted and the results are presented in a map on our website in real-time.

You can find out more and participate by going to our Reporting Initiative Home Page.

Finally, the Bree continues to develop case studies which can illustrate how our guidelines are being used by organizations that serve rural residence in Washington State. Currently, we are wrapping up a case study on an Asthma care plan documentation improvement project in public schools in Kittitas and Yakima counties and portions of Grant and Klickitat counties. When complete, this case study will be posted to the Bree’s implementation guide and shared with Bree members, work group members, and the broader community.

Like Bruno, we invite you to join us at our long table here at the Bree, to share good conversations with friends and to help support better health for all Washingtonians.