BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Unsafe injections in health settings contribute to a large burden of preventable blood-borne diseases. Current strategies to enhance injection safety in India almost exclusively target the formal health sector. However, injections are provided not only by doctors and nurses in the formal sector, but also by practitioners from the informal sector, such as traditional heal...

In Lithuania, as in the most societies around the world, the Internet and other information communication technologies (ICT) are mainly used by young, educated, well paid and urban consumers. Elderly, low-educated, low-paid and rural residents are among those who use the Internet the least. In our post-modern network society they are at the risk of social exclusion. This paper is aimed at the a...

Consulting psychologists have recognized the importance of providing comprehensive consultation and clinical services for consumers with special needs. Often because of distance and access to consultation services, remote and underserved populations may not have the necessary access to consultant specialists in psychology and other disciplines. Such services are now available through an innovat...

One commonly discussed benefit of broadband access in rural America is the potential for telemedicine visits that allow rural residents to take advantage of urbanized medical services. While the primary benefit of telemedicine is often viewed as improved health care access, the availability of these services also offers significant economic contributions to the local community. Site visits to 2...

From 1980 to 1999, rural designated hospitals closed at a disproportionally high rate. In response to this emergent threat to healthcare access in rural settings, the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 made provisions for the creation of a new rural hospital--the critical access hospital (CAH). The conversion to CAH and the associated cost-based reimbursement scheme significantly slowed the closure ra...

We review 1980s research on American rural hospitals within the context of a decade of increasing restrictiveness in the reimbursement and operating environments. Areas addressed include rural hospital definitions, organizational and financial performance, and strategic management activities. The latter category consists of hospital closure, diversification and vertical integration, swing-bed c...

Introduction: Approximately 20% of healthcare workers in high-income countries such as Australia, Canada and the USA work in rural areas. Healthcare workers are known to be vulnerable to occupational injury and poor work disability outcomes; given their rural–urban distribution, it is possible to compare work disability prevention in rural and urban areas. However, little attention has been pai...

The study of rural crime has the potential to make important contributions to crime policy, criminological theory, and research methods in criminology. Although most places in America remain rural, researchers have paid insufficient attention to rural crime and have not utilized the wide variations among rural areas as natural laboratories for research. This chapter outlines what is known about...

To the Editor: Studies in developing countries (DCs) have frequently reported a lower prevalence of allergic diseases (ADs) in rural areas compared with urban settings, and this has been attributed to the protective effects of environmental exposures such as rural lifestyle. Recent evidence from studies conducted in Africa and Asia showed that ADs are increasing in urban and even in rural setti...

A number of studies have compared general medical practices in rural locations with those in urban locations. Some of these studies have concentrated on the reasons why a GP might choose to work in a rural or urban setting. Others have examined the type of work required to be undertaken by medical professionals. Increasing use of information and communications technology (ICT) in medical practi...