Jericho, Tennessee — This town of about 2,000 people in the hills of East Tennessee lost its hospital, a 54-bed acute care facility, in March 2021. Campbell County, where Jericho is located, ranks 90th for health out of Tennessee’s 95 counties and has a poverty rate nearly double the national average, so losing a healthcare anchor had ripple effects throughout the region.
“Oh my goodness,” said Tawnya Block, a Jericho resident and health care quality manager. “That hospital was not only the medical lifeline of this community, it was the economic and social center of the community.”
Since 2010, 149 rural hospitals in the United States have closed or stopped treating inpatients, according to the University of North Carolina’s Cecil G. Shepps Center for Health Services Research. Tennessee had the second-highest number of closures in the nation with 15, and the highest number of closures per capita. Texas had the most rural hospital closures, with 25.
Every time a hospital closes, it sends medical and economic ripples through the region. When Jericho Medical Center closed, about 300 jobs were lost. Jericho’s restaurants and other small businesses also went out of business, said Bullock, who serves on the Tennessee Rural Health Association’s legislative committee. And towns have to contend with the hollowing out of their hospitals.
As dozens of small communities struggle with what to do with shuttered hospitals, researchers at the Schepps Center found that while hospital closures have a negative impact on local economies, that impact can be mitigated by repurposing the buildings into other types of medical facilities.
In Jericho, the building where the medical center was located is owned by the town, and Mayor Sandy Terry said the building is in good condition. But its last operator, Indiana-based Boa Vida Healthcare, has a license to run a medical facility there but has not yet announced plans for the building, leaving Jericho in limbo. Mayor Terry said local officials are in discussions with health care providers who have expressed interest in reopening the hospital, which is their preferred option. There is no Plan B in Jericho.
“We’re just hoping someone else will take over,” Terry said. The nearest emergency hospitals are a 30-minute drive away in La Follette, Tennessee, and across the state line in Corbin, Kentucky.
![Sandy Terry, wearing a bright blue blouse, stands next to the glass doors that mark the entrance to the old Jericho Medical Center.](https://kffhealthnews.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/Shuttered_Hospitals_Sandy_Terry.jpg)
An hour and a half away, in Fentress County, the building that once housed Jamestown Regional Medical Center has been vacant since June 2019, when Florida-based Renova Health, which also once operated Jericho Medical Center, closed it.
County Mayor Jimmy Johnson said Renova’s departure from Jamestown was so sudden that “all the beds were perfectly set up” and IV poles and wheelchairs were left in the hallways. About 150 jobs were lost when the center closed.
Johnson said Rennova owed $207,000 in back taxes to Fentress County, so the building was put up for auction in April. A local business owner bought it for $220,000, but Rennova was given a year to pay the back taxes and buy the building back, which it did within days.
Abandoned hospital buildings are scattered across Middle and Eastern Tennessee, but in western Tennessee, two communities have found new ways to use vacant buildings, even if they’re not reopening hospitals.
Somerville, about an hour east of Memphis, lost its Methodist Fayette Hospital in 2015. Parent company Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare donated the building to the town for $250,000, which is now a satellite campus of the University of Tennessee at Martin.
The renovation was driven by the town using other funds. Somerville City Administrator Bob Turner said the town and county both contributed $250,000 to Methodist University’s renovations. In the first year after moving to Somerville, the university raised another $125,000. Then the Tennessee governor contributed $875,000 from the state budget.
The city of Somerville is currently in the seventh year of a 10-year contract with the university, which leases the building from the town.
“We own the building, the property, it’s probably worth $15 million,” Turner said. “It’s a four-year university right here in the heart of Fayette County.”
Mendy Donnelly, Somerville’s community development director, said the county still desperately needs a hospital, but “we’re very happy to be able to get out of our misery.”
Ninety miles to the northeast, in rural Carroll County, Tennessee, another shuttered hospital has found new life.
The closure of McKenzie Regional Hospital in 2018 was a blow to the local economy, but Baptist Memorial Healthcare, which operates a hospital in nearby Huntingdon, purchased the assets, including the building, land, equipment and ambulance services, and then donated the building to the Town of McKenzie.
The site was eventually taken over by technology company Kashengo Corp. Kashengo CEO Ash Young said the hospital’s electrical equipment made it a perfect fit for a business like his. Young said Kashengo is now looking to repurpose abandoned hospitals across the country.
Jill Holland, a former McKenzie mayor and local government and special projects coordinator for the Southwest Tennessee Development District, believes the town can become a tech hub.
“It’s going to open up a lot of doors of opportunity for young people in the area,” Holland said.
![Jill Holland is standing outside a large building with glass windows, wearing a white blouse and a colorful scarf, smiling for the camera.](https://kffhealthnews.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/Shuttered_Hospitals_Jill_-Holland.jpg)
In Jamestown, the vacant hospital is “dilapidated,” said Johnson, the county mayor, “and could have been used to save lives.” Renova did not respond to a request for comment.
The University of Tennessee Medical Center opened a free-standing emergency room at another location in Jamestown, saving residents the 30-minute drive to the nearest emergency room, and Johnson sees the old hospital building serving the community as a homeless shelter or a treatment facility for substance use disorders.
Brock, the health care quality manager, believes things will improve in Jericho, but the community’s hopes have been dashed more than once.
Bullock believes freestanding emergency rooms could be a viable solution. He urges communities to respond to a “new era” in rural American health care: one in which hospitals must focus on their communities’ most urgent needs and think realistically about what they can provide.
“Maybe it’s just an emergency room, a sustainable emergency room that can house patients for a period of time and then transfer them out,” Block said, “and then we build off of that.”
“There are options,” she added.