In April of 2020, just a month after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, a team led by Centennial Area Health Education Center (CAHEC) began doing video interviews of people who filled a wide variety of roles in the rural healthcare response to this enormous threat, including nurses, clinicians, students, educators, administrators, a pharmacist, and even a veterinarian. Over the course of ten months, CAHEC obtained 81 interviews. Some of the participants were interviewed twice, both early and later in the course of the pandemic. Interviewees were almost all people who lived rurally and worked in healthcare. A large proportion came from CAHEC’s service area in eastern Colorado.
CAHEC chose to do these video interviews, first and foremost, to hold a mirror up to rural communities and the people who serve them, a largely underappreciated sector of America. Healthcare is especially challenging far from resource rich urban centers. It is important also to share these stories with a larger non-rural audience. Interviews range from nuts-and-bolts to inspirational.
A second goal of this project is for these videos to be exploited by researchers in a potentially broad range of fields—healthcare administration, public health, sociology, anthropology, history, etc.—for the rich cache of raw data that they represent. Interviews were intentionally kept unstructured so as to capture more of the flavor of the participants and to open the widest possible window to potential researchers.
The videos run on average about 40 minutes. All interviewees formally agreed to have their videos posted publicly, to be viewed by anybody who wants to see them, as well as used for research.
The acute Covid-19 pandemic affected most aspects of American life, both rural and urban. Widespread aftereffects, including to physical and emotional wellbeing, will ripple through our society for a long time to come. You can expect CAHEC to maintain this treasure trove of video interviews of rural people who were in the thick of the battle with Covid-19 in the very early stages of the pandemic. If you are an investigator who wants to know more about this database, contact CAHEC via email, contactcahec@gmail.com.