How a community-owned hospital in a town of 6,000 built the care that let its people come to work.
Montevideo, Minnesota, is a town of about 6,000 people — and the place its own hospital was struggling to staff. The problem wasn't that people didn't want to work there. It was that they couldn't.
CCM Health, a 25-bed community-owned critical access hospital, put the problem in a single sentence from its leadership: "We had people who wanted to work, but they couldn't work because they didn't have child care."
In a childcare desert, a hospital loses nurses not to competitors but to the kitchen table — staff who leave, or never apply, because there's no one to watch their children.
Leadership began thinking about a center back in 2018, recognizing the care gap as a direct barrier to recruiting and retaining staff. It took two years to turn that recognition into a building. Then, within two weeks of the center opening, a nurse who was seeking employment called with a question that captured the whole problem: "I just lost my child care for my twins. Do you have any openings for RNs?"
Within two weeks she was on staff — and still is today. One hire doesn't solve a workforce crisis, but it names it: the hospital wasn't short on willing workers. It was short on a way for them to be there.
The CCM Health Child Care Center opened in January 2020 — licensed for 24 children, located right across from the hospital, and owned and operated by the hospital itself rather than an outside provider. It grew to 31 children, and in 2025 the hospital committed to a $2.4 million replacement building for up to 70.
The hospital's own nurses now average 38 years old against a national average of 44 — a gap leadership credits to the center pulling younger clinicians into a town they might otherwise have passed by.
A straightforward chain from the business problem to the results — with the funding and the people who made it move made explicit.
Recruiting and retaining staff in a rural childcare desert. The hospital experienced it as vacancies, unfilled shifts, and candidates who never applied.
A child care center across from the hospital, owned and operated by CCM Health itself — so the care was usable and the hours aligned with clinical work.
As a critical access hospital, CCM is reimbursed cost-based by Medicare — a structure that made operating the center financially viable as a workforce investment.
This isn't an argument that every employer should build its own center. It's the set of moves this community got right — and they hold up even at a smaller scale.
The hospital treated the care gap as its own workforce risk, not a personal struggle — and held itself responsible for fixing it.
One nurse hired because care existed proved the thesis. Small, concrete wins justify bigger bets.
Cost-based reimbursement made operating a center sustainable. Understanding your own funding structure is half the design.
24 children became 31, then a 70-child build. The center earned its expansion.
A 38-year-old average nursing age shows the center pulls in a generation a rural town otherwise loses.
This field study is assembled from public, independent reporting on the initiative.
The people behind this initiative — how it was conceived, assembled, funded, and approved — in their own words.
▶ Hear How They Did It