Episode summary
The spring 2026 issue of Porter Falls Magazine led with “Twenty-Three Nurses and a County,” Ingrid Fossum’s story about the Porter County Rural Health Network: four primary-care clinics in Tamarack, Little Cedar, Grange Hollow and Otter Bend, plus a float pool, staffed by 31 registered nurses, 23 of them Porter graduates. In 2011 the network’s annual RN turnover was 40 percent; last year it was 9 percent, and it did not book a single agency shift.
Pa Nhia Lor ’14 has worked at the Tamarack clinic, in a former feed store 22 miles northeast of Porter Falls on County Road K, since the fall after she graduated, and now manages it. She describes a Tuesday: a farmer with a cut from a frozen gate latch, a toddler with an ear infection, and a hospital 48 minutes away in Lake City if the roads are good. The partnership began in 2011 with four seniors placed for the community-health rotation in NURS 4200; three were hired. It now places 14 seniors a year.
Dr. Grace Vasquez leads Home Connect, which gives older patients with heart failure or chronic lung disease a connected scale, a blood-pressure cuff, a tablet and a weekly video visit with a clinic nurse and a supervised senior nursing student. Her headline finding so far is not medical: almost a quarter of enrolled households had no usable home internet, and the first months of a heart-failure study were spent on cell signals. The hosts also ask about the waitlist for the nursing program, which both guests trace to clinical placements rather than classrooms.
Chapters
| Time | Chapter |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Cold open: 7:40 a.m. in Tamarack |
| 01:30 | Thirty-one nurses, twenty-three Porter grads |
| 07:15 | How a practicum became a staffing plan |
| 14:00 | What a rural clinic nurse does in a week |
| 20:40 | Home Connect and the cell-tower problem |
| 28:10 | The Rural Health Scholarship and the $6,000 reason to stay |
| 33:30 | The waitlist is a placement problem |
| 39:45 | Why they stay |
| 44:10 | Credits, and see you in August |
Selected transcript
An excerpt, lightly edited for reading. The full speaker-labeled transcript is in your podcast app’s transcript view, or email podcast@uwporterfalls.edu for an accessible document.
Corinne Lacasse: Pa Nhia, the magazine quoted you saying patients tell you two different numbers for their salt intake.
Pa Nhia Lor: They do. There’s what they eat, and there’s what they think I want to hear. I write down both and average them. I’m only partly joking. Out here you know the family, you know what’s in the church-basement hotdish, you know who’s going to tell you the truth.
Abe Tollefsrud: What did Porter not prepare you for?
Pa Nhia Lor: Being the only one. In a city you’re one nurse on a unit of thirty. In Tamarack, for the first hour of anything, you’re the whole hospital. The sim prepared me for the steps. Nothing prepares you for the quiet when you realize the ambulance is still twenty minutes out.
Corinne Lacasse: Grace, your study was supposed to be about heart failure.
Grace Vasquez: It is about heart failure. It’s just that first it was about cell towers. We mailed out tablets and scales and almost a quarter of the households couldn’t get a usable connection. One gentleman near Otter Bend could get one bar if he stood on his porch facing the silo.
Pa Nhia Lor: I know that porch.
Grace Vasquez: Of course you do. So we bought hotspots, and for the households where even that failed we built a phone-only version. My students learned more about rural health care from that than from any lecture I’ve given. The infrastructure is the intervention.
Abe Tollefsrud: Do your students get attached?
Grace Vasquez: The patients get attached. They ask for “their” student by name, and then the semester ends. So the outgoing and incoming students do the last visit together. It’s a handoff. Nurses do those all day.
Links mentioned
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. The Porter County Rural Health Network and its clinics, Home Connect, the nurses and faculty quoted and every staffing figure are invented; this episode is not medical advice, and anyone needing care should contact a real provider.