Background Rural health houses constitute a major provider of some primary health services in the villages of Iran. Given the challenges of providing health services in rural areas, health houses should be established based on the criteria of health network systems (HNSs). The value of these criteria and their precedence over others have not yet been thoroughly investigated. The present study w...

BACKGROUND This study analyses the association between rurality and local rate of avoidable hospitalizations in a Spanish region with high population dispersion. METHODS Ecological study using a municipality in the region of Castile and Leon (Spain) as the spatial unit of analysis. The variables used to operationalize rurality included the following: distance to hospital, population density, ...

BACKGROUND Given relatively less favorable health outcomes in rural Alabama, electronic health records (EHRs) have an even greater potential to improve quality and alleviate disparities if meaningfully used. OBJECTIVES We examined rural-urban differences as it pertained to perceived barriers, benefits, and motivating factors of EHR implementation. METHODS We used multivariate logistic model...

The availability, accessibility and acceptability of services are critical factors in rural health service delivery. In Canada, the aging population and the consequent increase in prevalence of dementia challenge the ability of many rural communities to provide specialized dementia care. This paper describes the development, operation and evaluation of an interdisciplinary memory clinic designe...

background: inequality in households’ and individuals' consumption expenditures is one of the most important aspects of health status difference among households and individuals. objectives: we investigated the impact of some macro-economic factors specially inequality factors on the iranian rural health status since 1986 through 2012. patients and methods: we conducted a longitudinal ecologica...

Public health in the United States began as a largely urban phenomenon, dating back to the late 1700s. In those days, public health was mostly concerned with issues such as sanitation and communicable diseases, which were of greater concern in areas with higher population density. By the late 1800s, however, it was apparent that the country's population was becoming more mobile and communicable...

Health care disparities in rural areas remain significant in the U.S. health care industry. Uncompensated care makes health care disparities in rural areas worse, and rural hospitals are unfavorably positioned to compete with urban hospitals in the economic-downturn marketplace. How uncompensated care affects quality care among rural hospitals has been lightly investigated. Given that many rura...

Formalized rural health service delivery networks are emerging as an over-arching response to the attrition of rural surgical and maternity services in Canada. In effective networks, there is strong collaborative leadership, form follows function, core network elements are identified and site-specific variations are accommodated to meet the surgical needs of the population in each geographic ca...

Globally, Pakistan has the third highest burden of maternal, fetal, and child mortality. It has made slow progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4 and 5 and in addressing common social determinants of health. The country also has huge challenges of political fragility, complex security issues, and natural disasters. We undertook an in-depth analysis of Pakistan's progress...