Center for Excellence in Rural Health-Hazard

Center Director

Dr. Baretta R. Casey, a longtime physician and health education advocate, began her term as the University of Kentucky Center for Excellence in Rural Health-Hazard’s fourth full-time director on Nov. 14, 2005.

A former private practice physician in Pikeville, from 2002 to 2006 Casey directed UK’s Hazard-based East Kentucky Family Medicine Residency Program, which trains medical school graduates for practice in rural areas. Under her guidance, the clinic that houses the residency program successfully applied for a $650,000 annual federal grant to extend health services to more low-income, uninsured Eastern Kentuckians. Effective Dec. 1, 2005, the clinic was renamed the UK North Fork Valley Community Health Center, making it the state’s only health center that also hosts a residency program.

Casey is a professor in the UK College of Medicine, vice chair of UK’s Department of Family and Community Medicine, and serves on the American Medical Association’s Council on Medical Education – the only representative on the 13-member council who lives outside an urban area. In September 2006, Casey was installed as the 156th president of the Kentucky Medical Association, just one year after receiving the organization’s Educational Achievement Award.

She earned Bachelor of Arts degrees in biology and chemistry from Pikeville College and later earned a Doctor of Medicine degree from UK. She spent three years in the Trover Foundation Family Practice Residency Program in Madisonville, six years as medical director of a nursing home in Pike County, and then eight years in solo practice in Pikeville.

In 2006, Casey earned a Master’s of Public Health degree from UK. Her articles on topics such as diabetes education, domestic violence, diagnosis of chronic hearing loss, and rural Kentucky’s physician shortage have been published in the Journal of the Kentucky Medical Association, the Kentucky Academy of Family Practice Journal, and The Maryland Family Doctor, and in September 2004 she was the focus of a cover story in Medical Economics.

Casey is a 2006 graduate of the Johnson & Johnson/UCLA Health Care Executive Program, a management development program exclusively for executive directors and leaders of community-based health care organizations. And in May 2007, she was installed as president of the Kentucky Academy of Family Physicians.

In 2008, Dr. Casey received the National Rural Health Association’s top honor − the Louis Gorin Award for Outstanding Achievement in Rural Health Care. The award recognizes an individual who has made contributions to rural health policy, legislation, health care and health programs at the state and national levels. In 2009, she was appointed to NRHA’s Rural Health Congress, the 18,000-member organization’s policy-making body.