Alaska Center for Rural Health director, Beth Landon, to become president of National Rural Health Association

Beth Landon, director of the Alaska Center for Rural Health (ACRH), recently won her election to become the president-elect of the National Rural Health Association (NRHA). The NRHA is a membership organization dedicated to the improvement of health care services in rural areas.

Rural health care providers, educators and administrators created the Alaska Center for Rural Health in 1987. The Center is housed within the School of Nursing, College of Health and Social Welfare UAA. In 2005, the ACRH secured a federal designation to serve as Alaska's Area Health Education Center (AHEC) Program - the first in the country to be housed in a School of Nursing. The AHEC enables Alaska to institutionalize a statewide university-industry partnership focused on strengthening our health workforce.

Beth Landon has been active in health affairs since the early 1990s when she developed health education interventions for ethnic minorities in Thailand with the Peace Corps. Since then, she has worked extensively with rural community health needs assessments, youth tobacco prevention, behavior change intervention research, international HIV/AIDS networks, and international finance related to maternal and child health.

As director of the Alaska Center for Rural Health, Landon is responsible for the decision-making process of the ACRH Board of Directors, strengthening state and federal partnerships, implementing research projects in health services, communicating information to Alaska's rural health system and improving recruitment and retention programs in Alaska.

Congratulations to Beth Landon on this major accomplishment! For more information on the Alaska Center for Rural Health visit http://nursing.uaa.alaska.edu/acrh/ .