Weekly Writers Round-Up: Telehealth in Rural America, the Work-from-Home Revolution, and Women’s Healthcare

Each week, we’ll be featuring opinion pieces from the alumni and current participants of AF’s Writing Fellows Program. A few highlights from the past week are below. Do you dream of having bylines like these? Learn more about how the Writing Fellows Program can help boost your writing career.

Remote Change: Telehealth Has Shown Its Value During the Pandemic by Anthony Hennen (Spring 2019) in the expatalachians
One of the few things the federal government has done right during the pandemic has been to loosen regulations on expanding telehealth. As those barriers have fallen away, the benefits of telehealth, especially for mental health, have become apparent. Appalachian states, from North Carolina to Ohio, have also made getting health care to the people who need it easier than before COVID-19.

In the future, state and federal officials should take note of how this episode of de-regulation has helped some of the most at-risk groups of Americans, rural or otherwise. Making it easier for doctors, therapists, and hospitals to use phone calls and video calls for treatment has been vital…

The pandemic is ushering in a work-from-home revolution. It’s about time by Chelsea Follett (Summer 2017) in Business Insider
The novel coronavirus pandemic has pushed people to use technology in new ways, including the implementation of remote work at a scale never seen before. 

Technology is often portrayed as an enemy of the worker, but  in reality, technology has eliminated many difficult, tedious and dangerous jobs.And the  loss of jobs to technology has been more than offset by a rise in the caring professions, and in creative and knowledge-intensive jobs…

Louisiana Women Deserve Better than June Medical by Deanna Wallace (Spring 2020) in the National Review
After years of researching Louisiana abortion clinics, I couldn’t ignore how much worse most Louisiana women’s experiences would be compared with mine. Some women would undergo surgery in clinics that had been cited for using improperly sterilized surgical tools or for reusing single-use IV bags. Instead of being introduced to a trained anesthesiologist, as I was, untrained nurses who stored syringes in leaky zippered baggies would administer their medication. Instead of recovering in a private room with loved ones close by, they would recover in a cramped public room on torn tables that are not always wiped down in between patients. Far from having a trusted physician hold their hands, as mine did, many of these women have no idea who is performing surgery on them, nor will they know that abortion clinics in Louisiana have hired radiologists and ophthalmologists to perform surgical abortions…