By Lawson Powers
One of the key issues in the race for State House District 117 is healthcare, specifically how constituents in rural areas are getting medical treatment.
Senate Bill 351 would have allowed nurses to prescribe medicine to their patients, as well as to conduct radiographic images, such as x-rays, CT’s or MRI’s, but the bill was watered down before it passed, to the point where nurses had to collaborate with physicians to prescribe medication and conduct radiographic procedures.
After her Oct. 16 campaign stop at the Demosthenian Hall on UGA’s North Campus, Democratic candidate for State House 117 Deborah Gonzalez said, “The problem with it is that you have patients in rural areas and these nurses are having to wait in a long line for a doctor to tell them, 'okay' for these procedures.”
Senate Bill 351 does allow nurses to work in collaboration with doctors, but it’s not always that easy, said Gonzalez.
“You may have a doctor with multiple nurses, with multiple patients and each time they have to go in and fully review the file and then relay the decision back to the nurse,” said Gonzalez. “It just takes a lot of time that maybe those patients don’t have.”
Gonzalez’s plan is to fight for a bill similar to Senate Bill 351 that goes the extra step in making sure nurses can do more of their job without needing to collaborate with doctors. Her Republican opponent for the State House District 117 seat Houston Gaines agrees that rural healthcare needs assistance, but not in the ways that Gonzalez laid out.
“What you have happening with a lot of these rural hospitals is they’re running out of funding and they can’t afford to stay in business,” said Gaines. “I want to work with the House Rural Development Council to work on getting funding for these hospitals."
Regarding Gonzalez’s plan for addressing rural healthcare, Gaines said it isn’t that simple.
“Nurses aren’t always going to be able to do everything that might need to be done,” said Gaines. “You need hospitals with doctors in these areas that are able to see patients regularly and know their needs and their illnesses well.”
Michael Schroeder, a staff writer for U.S. News and World Report, who has been reporting on healthcare issues for 13 years, recently wrote an analysis of rural healthcare plans in Minnesota and Texas.
When pressed further for an analysis of rural Georgia, Schroeder said, “The hospitals surrounding Athens are facing staffing issues because most doctors are being pulled to higher paying positions in Athens and Atlanta. The subsidies happening in Texas cost $800,000 for community healthcare workers. If you need doctors and not nurses to prescribe the medicine or run tests, it could end up costing a lot more to fix.”
Among Senate Bill 351’s opposition is the Medical Association of Georgia, who said in a statement that the bill would “undermine patient safety.”