We find that the presence of village Internet facilities, offering government to citizen services, is positively associated with the rate at which the villagers obtain some of these services. In a study of a rural Internet project in India, we identify a positive correlation for two such Internet services: obtaining birth certificates for children and applications for old age pensions. Both the...

Beginning with a brief overview of national health care quality improvement efforts, this article describes national initiatives to improve the quality of care and patient safety, along with the challenges of measuring quality of care in rural settings. Next, the article analyzes the performance of rural Minnesota hospitals in the Hospital Compare and Leapfrog initiatives and compares the resul...

Rural hospitals continue to face the threat of closure. Congress passed legislation in 1989 and 1990 to offer an alternative for small rural hospitals; the legislation encourages hospitals to form networks comprising an essential access community hospital (EACH) and one or more rural primary care hospitals. This legislation is a tightly focused program that will affect no more than an estimated...

The results are reported of a study of casualty and surgical services in five general practitioner hospitals in Perthshire - Aberfeldy, Auchterarder, Blairgowrie, Crieff and Pitlochry. Details of the total workload, the nature of the conditions treated and the referral rate to major hospitals are given. Figures for the Royal Infirmary, Perth, the main referral hospital for the county, are also ...

INTRODUCTION Little evidence exists about the impact of strategies to increase rural retention in developing countries. To address Thailand's long-lasting critical shortage of doctors, two new government-funded projects to increase the production of rural doctors have been employed through collaboration between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Public Health (MOPH). The present stud...

OBJECTIVES In this longitudinal study, we examined changes in the geographical distribution of physicians in Japan from 2000 to 2014 by clinical specialty with adjustments for healthcare demand based on population structure. METHODS The Japanese population was adjusted for healthcare demand using health expenditure per capita stratified by age and sex. The numbers of physicians per 100 000 de...

PURPOSE To evaluate reasons for non-compliance with post-cataract surgical follow-up in rural China, and assess the impact of incentives on improving compliance. METHODS Patients having undergone cataract surgery more than 3 months previously at cataract surgery training hospitals in Guangdong were invited by telephone and advertisements to a hospital-based study examination, with compensatio...