Rural Health Initiative Expands To Marathon County

The Rural Health Initiative (RHI), a nonprofit program to provide basic health screenings for farm families, is expanding in central Wisconsin.

The RHI was started in Shawano County as a way of reaching farmers who are too busy to get regular medical screenings, or don’t have them covered by insurance.

“They’re just busy working and don’t come in, they’re paying for their own insurance and have high deductibles, there’s isolation, there’s rural and urban – there’s a lot of issues going on,” says executive director Rhonda Strebel, who helped start the nonprofit program in 2004. “And it was the farm women that said, ‘If you want to see our men you need to come to the farm, because that’s where they are.’”

So Strebel started something she calls kitchen screenings, in which a nurse visits farm families for free with a basic medical kit to check on things like cholesterol, glucose levels, blood pressure, height, weight and biometrics.

The RHI was so successful in Shawano County that it expanded to Waupaca and Outagamie Counties last year. This year, Strebel has been approached by Marathon County officials.

“Marathon County is a very large agricultural county, so this is a very large undertaking for us,” she says. “We’d like to see our staff trained and ready to go by this fall, by the end of harvest season or by this winter.”

It costs only about $75,000 per year to run the RHI in each county. About half of the funding comes from health care providers. Strebel is in talks to get the program paid for in Marathon County.