BACKGROUND Urban and rural communities differ in the incidence of several diseases including coronary heart disease and some cancers. Lower hip fracture rates among rural than urban populations have been reported but few studies have compared rural and urban fractures at sites other than the hip. OBJECTIVE To compare total and site specific fracture rates among adult residents of rural and ur...

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of rural hospital closure on access to and costs of medical care. State all-payers hospital discharge data were utilized to test the hypotheses that hospital market areas that experienced hospital closure would have lower admission rates, longer average length of stay and higher costs per admission than hospital market areas where hospitals re...

Between 1990 and 2000, the Latino population in the United States increased by 61 percent, becoming the largest minority group. Language differences contribute to patient safety and access to healthcare concerns for limited English proficiency (LEP) Latinos. The objectives of this research were to determine the techniques rural hospitals use to accommodate Spanish-speaking LEP patients, to iden...

The role of place has emerged as an important factor in determining people's health experiences. Rural populations experience an excess in mortality and morbidity compared to those in urban settings. One of the factors thought to contribute to this rural-urban health disparity is access to healthcare. The objective of this analysis was to examine access to specialized medical care services and ...

BACKGROUND The importance of depression as a complication of HIV infection is increasingly understood, and people living in rural areas are at increased risk for depression. However, it is not known whether living in rural areas amplifies the risk of depression in patients with HIV. METHODS We compared the prevalence of depression between rural and metropolitan HIV patients seen at the Dartmo...

BACKGROUND Information on adult mortality is essentially non-existent in Ethiopia particularly from rural areas where access to health services is limited and most deaths occur at home. This study was conducted with the aim of identifying causes of adult death in a rural population of Ethiopia using a simplified verbal autopsy instrument. METHODS All deaths in the age-group 15-49 years during...

Mountain livestock systems, and particularly those based on breeding small ruminants, traditionally constituted a mainstay element of the local economy in Southeastern Spain's mountainous areas. With the rural exodus, which began in the early sixties, these systems were in critical danger of disappearing, due to, among other causes, the scarcity of shepherds and goatherds, the breakdown of an e...

CONTEXT Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a public health problem that affects people across the entire social spectrum. However, no previous population-based public health studies have examined the prevalence of IPV in rural areas of the United States. Research on IPV in rural areas is especially important given that there are relatively fewer resources available in rural areas for the preven...