Loritta Sullivan waits outside of Wayne General Hospital in Waynesboro with tears in her eyes as her son goes through laparoscopic gallbladder surgery. Earlier, she received heart-breaking news that he also has spots on his lungs that are too small for doctors to perform a biopsy to determine if they are cancerous.
Wayne General is the only hospital within 54 miles of the city. The next nearest is Anderson Regional Medical Center in Meridian. If Wayne General wasn’t there, Sullivan’s other option would be to make the more than one-hour trip to Forrest General Hospital in Hattiesburg – 62 miles from her hometown of Waynesboro.
Mississippi has 64 rural hospitals, and 31 of those are at risk of closing, according to a recent report. The state has the highest percentage of at risk rural hospitals in the country. The risks are determined by financial factors raised in an analysis by management and consulting firm Navigant.
In this essay, hospital employees, former patients and families of patients from around the state share what their hospitals mean to them and their communities.
Wayne General Hospital – Waynesboro
Loritta Sullivan
Bolivar Medical Center – Cleveland
Lewis Stokes & Tabitha Stokes
The University of Mississippi Medical Center – Grenada
Mary Wright
Merit Health Natchez
Lisa Busby
Franklin County Memorial Hospital – Meadville
Melissa Wheatly
Field Health System – Centreville
Julius Anderson
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.