David Hartley

Director, Maine Rural Health Research Center

Education: University of Minnesota, BS, 1972; MHA, 1986; PhD, 1993.

Research Interests: rural mental health services and the rural safety net, rural substance abuse, national evaluation of Critical Access Hospitals

Professor Hartley teaches Community Health & Medical Care, and Health Information Management. He is the Director of the Maine Rural Health Research Center. His research currently includes Active Living for Rural Youth, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and several projects in rural mental health services and rural substance abuse. He has presented papers on these subjects at the Association for Health Services Research, regional meetings of the National Association of State Offices of Rural Health, the National Conference of State Mental Health Program Directors, the National Rural Health Association, the American Public Health Association, the International Rural Network and the annual conference of the Clinical Laboratory Management Association. Dr. Hartley is a past President of the Maine Rural Health Association, and sat on the National Rural Health Association's Rural Health Policy Board for 6 years. In 2003, he received the Distinguished Researcher award from that organization. In 2004, he sat on the National Academy of Science, Institute of Medicine Committee on the Future of Rural Health, which published "Quality Through Collaboration: The Future of Rural Health" in 2005. Other recent publications include "Rural Health Disparities, Population Health and Rural Culture" in the American Journal of Public Health, a paper on the treatment of mental health symptoms in rural emergency rooms published in the Journal of Rural Health, a discourse on the state of rural health research, published in the Canadian Journal of Nursing Research, and a series of working papers on the mental health workforce.