Behavioral telehealth is a reasonable solution to the accessibility to mental health care problem that exists in many rural communities. This paper reports the results of a multiple case study of a behavioral telehealth program administered through a marriage and family therapy training program. The results suggest that mental health services can be effectively delivered using existing distance...

INTRODUCTION Rural and remote communities of Australia, particularly those including Aboriginal people, experience greater morbidity and mortality across a range of health outcomes compared to urban communities. Previous national data have demonstrated that rural and remote communities experience a disproportionate burden of communicable diseases compared to their urban counterparts. This syste...

INTRODUCTION In spite of a sharp decline, since 2000, in the number of rural communities in Canada that offer local maternity care, there remain significant numbers of small rural maternity services that provide elective maternity care without on-site access to cesarean section. In communities with an elective maternity service without local access to surgical capability, practitioners must be ...

This paper explores how local actors can play a role in bridging the rural broadband divide. It presents the bottom-up development of broadband infrastructure in the rural region of ‘Sogn & Fjordane’, Norway. To bridge the broadband divide individuals, businesses and public sector in several rural communities have joined forces and have taken an initiative to develop and operate local broadband...

In Australia, we are facing a period of mental health reform with the establishment of federally funded community youth services in rural areas of the country. These new services have great potential to improve the mental health of rural adolescents. In the context of this new initiative, we have four main objectives with this article. First, we consider the notion of social capital in relation...

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...

CONTEXT Rurality is associated with a number of direct and indirect causes of eye disease. The direct causes are best described as lifestyle factors, such as exposure to UV light and occupational risks. Indirect factors are those where the occurrence of a predisposition is magnified due to rural population distributions, for example gender and age. ISSUE Research into rurality and optical hea...

INTRODUCTION A variety of studies have indicated that rural communities have fewer mental health services and professionals than their urban counterparts. This study will examine the shortages of mental health professionals in rural communities as well as the impact of inadequate mental health services access on rural hospitals. METHODS A sample frame of 1162 rural hospitals was compiled, and...

Rural libraries in Malaysia are purposively built to increase the level of people’s knowledge and thus produce an information society, especially in rural communities. The services and facilities provided are expected to change the lifestyle of the local community. The main objective of this study is to suggest the potential impingement factors for Information and Communication Technology (ICT)...

From 1884 onwards, Britain experienced a series of major droughts, which reached their peak in the 'Long Drought' (1890-1909). Despite being imagined as a wet part of the world, rural Wales was hard hit as many communities did not have access to reliable water supplies. As medical officers of health and newspapers talked about water famines, alarm focused on questions of purity and disease as d...