Band-Aid Care: When Keeping Rural People Healthy Requires Creative Solutions (Series, 3/6)

The third article of Thurka Sangaramoorthy’s six-part series in partnership with Barn Raiser was released last week. Read an excerpt from Band-Aid Care: When Keeping Rural People Healthy Requires Creative Solutions below:

“Mid-sentence during our interview, David, a local physician and community clinic director on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, paused, looked past me out the window of his office, and said quietly: “No matter what I do, I feel like I am just putting Band-Aids on things that need stitches.”

He had just told me about an undocumented farmworker with diabetes who couldn’t afford the $400 insulin pen that would allow him to manage his condition while working in 110-degree chicken houses. David had been getting pharmaceutical representatives to give him free samples, essentially running his own informal medication distribution system. When his supervisors told him to stop providing this “free care,” David’s response was simple: “Why? Nothing is stopping me from continuing to do this for him.”

This is the reality of rural health care: providers and patients must create makeshift solutions to navigate systems that weren’t designed for their circumstances. On Maryland’s Eastern Shore and across rural America, both health care workers and immigrants have developed what I call “Band-Aid care”—temporary, improvised responses to permanent, structural problems.”

This series — Rethinking Immigration and Health in Rural America — translates the concepts and theories first published in her 2023 book, Landscapes of Care, for a broader, public audience at a time when better understandings of immigrant realities are as urgent as ever.

Barn Raiser is an outlet which supports “trusted, independent journalism spotlighting critical issues and amplifying the diverse voices shaping the future of rural communities.”

Look out for new articles in this series over the coming weeks.