Blake Farmer
Blake Farmer is Nashville Public Radio's senior health care reporter. In a partnership with Kaiser Health News and NPR, Blake covers health in Tennessee and the health care industry in the Nashville area for local and national audiences.
Blake has worked at WPLN throughout his career, most recently serving as news director and primary editor for the newsroom. Previously, his reporting focused on education and the military. He's also enjoyed producing stories about midnight frog gigging and churches holding gun raffles.
Growing up in East Nashville, Blake attended Lipscomb Academy. He went to college in Texas at Abilene Christian University where he cut his teeth in radio at KACU-FM. Before joining WPLN full time in 2007, Blake also wrote for the Nashville City Paper and filed international stories for World Christian Broadcasting.
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Increasingly, private equity firms shape staffing decisions at hospital emergency rooms, research shows. One apparent effect: Hiring fewer doctors and more health care practitioners who earn far less. -
Clinics that care for long COVID patients are wrestling with how to handle a condition that is still poorly understood and has no widely accepted treatments.
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When rural hospitals go out of business, they're frequently gone for good. But now, some comebacks are a welcome sign for communities that have been without easy access to health care.
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Some rural hospitals are in such bad shape, they're selling for next to nothing. One company is snapping several distressed or closed hospitals in rural Tennessee, hoping to turn a profit. -
Festival promoters are allowing lifesaving medication as fentanyl deaths surge, but volunteers are often left to distribute it, and more controversial forms of harm reduction aren't openly allowed. -
Reproductive rights proponents worry about the risk of counseling those who seek medication abortions, though they've published online support techniques and guides for safe use of the drugs. -
The Southern Baptist Convention offered commitments at its closely watched two-day annual meeting in Anaheim, Calif., to address sexual abuse problems kept hidden for years. -
For COVID patients, ECMO is a last-ditch respiratory treatment in which only about half survive. Yet a new small study suggests many lives would still have been saved if there had been more machines. -
State medical boards have an obligation to investigate complaints about doctors, such as those who spread COVIC misinformation. But in Tennessee and other states, lawmakers are saying 'not so fast' -
The pandemic pay for traveling nurses was too good to pass up for many RNs. But some are ready to settle down at home, and they're finding full-time jobs aren't keeping up with salary increases.
