November 2024 Reading Club: Rural Health

Posted in: All Members, Opportunity to participate

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NNLM Reading Club brings awareness to rural health this month. We are pleased to be featuring three new books this month:

• Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial by Corban Addison
• The Most Costly Journey edited by Marek Bennett
• The Hospital: Life, Death and Dollars in a Small American Town by Brian Alexander

Books and health information resources are available on our Reading Club site. We would like to thank our newly created NNLM Reading Club Advisory Group which is made up of NNLM members who worked together to select the three books featured this month and developed the book discussion guides.

Registration is open for the Rural Health Webinar Series taking place November 6-21, 2024. All events are held at 2pm ET/1pm CT/12pm MT/11am PT. This series is an exploration of the efforts communities take to address the unique health needs of rural populations in the United States and aims to provide practical evidence-based solutions to support librarians, health educators, community leaders, and direct care providers to improve rural health outcomes. One of the events is a book discussion on the Most Costly Journey, one of our featured books this month.

• Building Healthy, Resilient Communities in Florida’s Rural Panhandle on November 6, 2024 – This presentation will provide an overview of preliminary data from opioid users and library directors across the nation.
• Facilitating Rural Access to Quality Health Information through Little Free Libraries on November 7, 2024 – This presentation will address an NNLM grant-funded community partnership between a public library and a university health science library.
• Graphic Medicine Discussion: The Most Costly Journey on November 12, 2024 – Please join NNLM to participate in a discussion of the book The Most Costly Journey, one of our feature books this month, covering topics such as the intersection of race, immigration status and geography on mental health, the uses of graphic medicine to tell overlooked stories, and more.
• When Your Community Is Your Hospital on November 13, 2024 – This presentation will provide an overview of a partnership that connected organizations in the rural northern region of California with a bilingual health educator and delivered local trainings, both in English and Spanish, that allowed community health workers to learn among their peers about the health information resources from the National Library of Medicine and other resources in their communities.
• Promoting Walking for Health in Rural Communities on November 14, 2024 –  Rural American adults have higher rates of chronic physical activity-related illness and are less active than their urban counterparts, with less than 20% meeting U.S. physical activity guidelines of 150-300 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity per week.
• Palmetto Connect: Fostering Digital Inclusion in Rural South Carolina on November 19, 2024 – This session will cover a program designed to help close the digital divide ­for residents in rural and underserved areas of­ South Carolina by increasing internet access and affordability, training people in digital literacy, and connecting individuals to quality-of­-lif­e resources such as telehealth through digital inclusion.
• Social Connectedness and Improving the Health of Rural Communities on November 20, 2024 – This presentation will review possible interventions for improving rural community health through social connectedness.
• Rural Health Resources on November 21, 2024 – This webinar will describe hallmarks of rural America, identify access challenges of living in rural communities, and equip participants with tools to service the health information needs of those living in rural communities.