JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Missouri residents stationed elsewhere because of military service can now use a state website to get ballots for elections.

Secretary of State Jason Kander says the website allows people to create a secure account to register to vote and to request and receive absentee ballots.

The website can be used not only by military members but also by their relatives, Peace Corps workers and Missouri voters who are working for religious charities in other countries.   The site is located here    https://www.momilitaryvote.com

WAKEFIELD, Kan. (AP) — A northern Kansas man’s troubles may go beyond a burned-out mobile home after firefighters reported finding an apparent marijuana-growing operation inside the structure.

KMAN-AM reports  the fire broke out around 1 a.m. Saturday in the Clay County town of Wakefield.

Clay County Sheriff Chuck Dunn says firefighters doused the flames and notified his office after coming across what appeared to be a marijuana operation.

Dunn says officers found more than 50 marijuana plants, along with grow lights, an automatic watering system and a ventilation system.

A 54-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of growing and possessing marijuana and other offenses.

The sheriff said the fire rekindled Saturday night and destroyed the rest of the mobile home. The cause both times has not been determined.

By Mike Shields
KHI News Service

LAKIN — Though 25 percent of Americans still live in rural areas, only 10 percent of doctors do, according to the National Rural Health Association, and finding physicians and other medical professionals willing to work in the hinterlands remains a serious, growing problem in Kansas and other parts of the United States.

But in Kearny County, on the High Plains near the Kansas-Colorado boundary where there are only about five residents per square mile, one small hospital has adopted a distinctive approach to recruitment that in a relatively short time has produced a staff that includes five doctors, five physician assistants and a growing volume of patients.

A sixth doctor and a sixth physician assistant are scheduled to start work at the hospital next year.

“We have more candidates interested in coming here than we have room to hire,” said Benjamin Anderson, chief executive at Kearny County Hospital. “It’s not rocket science, but to do it requires a hospital to be mission-focused and it requires the right kind of mission-focused governance and leadership, and I think not every organization has that.

“But any hospital has the ability to do this,” he said, “and we would hand the blueprint to anyone who wants it for free.”
Four types of doctor

Earlier in his career, Anderson worked as a physician recruiter and saw four general types of doctors willing to work in rural areas:
• A person born and raised in the area who chose to return home.

• Foreign doctors who gained U.S. resident status by agreeing to work (usually temporarily) in an underserved area.

• “Challenged doctors,” those with addictions or other problems that “don’t do well with accountability issues.”

“And the fourth kind is the missionary,” Anderson said, “the one driven by mission or purpose” to treat those in need. “And we have intentionally chosen that fourth category.”

Those that Kearny County Hospital recruits, he said, “aren’t that interested in country clubs, not that interested in ego and money and prestige and elite social clubs. What they are there for is to serve. That doesn’t mean our community is Third World and it doesn’t mean it is inferior. There is need everywhere.”

The hospital serves patients from nine counties, including many who have come to the area to work at the Tyson Foods slaughterhouse in nearby Holcomb.
Among the beef packing plant’s 3,300 employees are immigrants from 30 or 40 countries.

Anderson said part of the pitch the hospital makes to “missionary” doctors is that “they get to serve anywhere in the world by serving in Lakin, Kansas.”

“It’s a big draw for the people we are recruiting because our employees spend their vacation time serving in the places those people are from,” he said.
Among the perks the hospital offers the doctors are eight weeks off each year to accommodate their interests in overseas mission work.

“We recognize the tie between international and domestic service,” Anderson said.

The doctors, who are employees of the hospital, also have four-day work weeks and limited emergency room calls.

“We have very, very reasonable ER calls to protect their quality of life in that way,” Anderson said.

The Zomba-Lakin connection

Three of the hospital’s doctors have been through Via Christi’s International Family Medicine Fellowship, a one-year post-residency program that focuses on teaching family practice physicians the clinical skills needed to go “where others won’t” and to deal with the variety of conditions and difficult working circumstances one might expect to find in the world’s poorest and most remote corners.

Dr. John Birky, for example, is a fellowship-trained physician at Kearny County Hospital who can pull teeth, a skill he put to use earlier this month on a mission trip to Zomba, Zimbabwe, a village in southern Africa.

He traveled there with Anderson, fellow Kearny County physician Dr. Arlo Reimer and 14 others.

Anderson said it was his fifth trip to Zomba in four years. On this latest journey, the hospital group delivered 115 gift boxes put together by hospital employees and Lakin residents for the village children.

Zomba, Anderson said, “is becoming a sister community of Lakin.”

Pioneer Baby

Back home, Kearny County Hospital has used its doctors to launch a program called Pioneer Baby, which among other things is attempting to improve prenatal care and reduce the area’s relatively high rate of gestational diabetes and cesarean deliveries.

It developed from the hospital’s growing obstetrics services.

“OB-GYN is a risky endeavor,” Anderson said. “If we’re going to do it, we need to be good at it. And to really be good, we need to do a lot of it.

“These mission-minded doctors are very popular,” he said. “Women will drive two hours to have them deliver their babies. Our hospital delivered 195 babies last year (up from 112 in 2009) and 82 percent were from outside our county, and that’s really because of the care they receive from these doctors.”

The initiative has been helped along by a grant of more than $200,000 from the Children’s Miracle Network, according to Lisette Jacobson, a faculty member at the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita.

Jacobson helped write the hospital’s grant application and is putting together a team from the medical school to evaluate the Pioneer Baby program and find ways to reduce gestational diabetes and related health conditions, which Jacobson said occur disproportionately among Hispanic, Asian and American Indian women.
The grant money has been used to buy equipment for the hospital’s birthing program, which has become a collaborative effort that includes the hospital, KU and the United Methodist Mexican-American Ministries, which operates health clinics in Garden City, Dodge City, Liberal and Ulysses.

Jacobson said though there are ways to help prevent gestational diabetes or minimize its likelihood, little is known about effectively treating it once it is a problem. It is usually detected about the time a woman is in the 22nd week of pregnancy.

“The literature is just very vague on evidence-based intervention,” she said.

A potential benefit of the Pioneer Baby initiative is that it could produce successful treatments or responses.

“This is a very unique project,” Jacobson said. “If we find something that works, that could elevate it to other rural areas not limited to the state of Kansas. We’re hoping this project will lead to the kind of model project that other states could model their interventions after.”

There are other care initiatives under way or in the works at the hospital, Anderson said, including a telemedicine project aimed at dealing with wound care, using a remote specialist.

“Wound care is a challenge out here,” Anderson said.

The hospital also is looking at telemedicine for follow-ups with patients after surgery.

Housing shortage

Despite the hospital’s success recruiting doctors, serious needs remain in the region, particularly for certain specialists.
We have our share of problems,” Anderson said. “We have no endocrinologist in our region. Our family practice doctors are managing all the diabetes.”

There is only one dermatologist in that part of the state, and “she’s booked out for six weeks.”

And Anderson said there are no psychiatrists living west of Hays.

“It’s really a problem, and on top of that mental health is poorly funded,” he said.

It is on the hospital’s “radar” to recruit psychiatrists using the same mission-driven approach it has used to attract other doctors, he said. “But we need the infrastructure in place first to do it.”

Decent, affordable housing is so scarce in Lakin that when Anderson sees a good rental property come open, the hospital leases it so that it will be available to rent to new staff moving to town.

“Housing is a major problem and at the rate our organization is growing, there’s not enough,” he said.

Financially, the hospital continues to run “on a thin margin” as it waits for the “upfront investment for future growth” to pay off, he said.

“We made a lot of investments in physicians and equipment and infrastructure that will probably take a year to mature,” Anderson said. “It’s a gamble we’re taking. We think it is a pretty good gamble, but it is still a gamble to hire that many doctors and support staff that quickly.”

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas State Board of Education members face a decision about how much data to release from statewide math and reading tests after public schools faced problems administering the exams.

The board’s discussion Tuesday was a response to cyberattacks and glitches in the computerized testing system earlier this year.

The Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation at the University of Kansas told the board last month that it should not release data for individual schools and districts. The biggest problems occurred with testing from March 10 to April 10.

The center designed pilot tests aligned with multistate academic standards approved by the board in 2010. The computerized tests moved away from multiple-choice questions and toward open-ended problems.

The state Department of Education typically releases data from testing each fall.

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — The University of Kansas has a new director of news and media relations, and she previously held a similar job at archrival Kansas State University.

KU announced Monday that Erinn Barcomb-Peterson had started the director’s job on the Lawrence campus after nine years at Kansas State.

Barcomb-Peterson holds a journalism degree from the University of Kansas. She worked as a reporter for The Eudora News and design editor for The Ottawa Herald before going to work for Kansas State’s news and editorial services in 2005. She became director there in 2011.

The KU job became open when Jill Jess Phythyon took a similar position in March at Ohio State University’s College of Nursing. KU School of Medicine Communications Director David Martin replaced her temporarily.

LANSING, Kan. (AP) — A minimum-security inmate at a northeast Kansas prison is back in custody after reportedly walking away from a work detail.

The Leavenworth Times reports 52-year-old Ronald J. Emons was apprehended without incident late Monday afternoon at or near Fort Leavenworth.

Emons is serving time at the nearby Lansing Correctional Facility for violating his probation for a conviction of attempted indecent liberties with a child.

KAIR Radio reported that Emons went with a work crew around 6 a.m. Monday to a reservoir outside the prison compound’s fenced area. Staff noticed him missing around 10:40 a.m.

A judge sentenced Emons in July 2011 to probation for attempted indecent liberties with a 14- to 16-year-old child. He has been sent to Lansing twice for violating the terms of his probation.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A national gun-control group says it is planning to challenge a Kansas law declaring that the federal government has no authority to regulate guns manufactured, sold and kept only in the state.

The Washington-based Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence announced Monday that it would file a federal lawsuit Wednesday against the state law.

The Kansas law was enacted in 2013 and makes it a felony for any U.S. government employee to attempt to enforce a federal regulation or treaty when it comes to Kansas-only firearms, ammunition or accessories.

A similar law enacted in 2009 in Montana was struck down by the federal courts.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback promised a vigorous defense of his state’s law.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has vetoed legislation that would have limited who may work as a health insurance guide for a new federally run website.

The Democratic governor cited drafting errors in the bill while announcing the veto Monday.

Nixon had signed a bill last year requiring state licensure for health insurance guides. But a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in January, saying that it was pre-empted by federal law.

Missouri is one of several states that have tried to impose more stringent requirements on insurance navi