BACKGROUND Understanding the barriers that women in Haiti face to giving birth at a health facility is important for improving coverage of facility delivery and reducing persistently high maternal mortality. We linked health facility survey data and population survey data to assess the role of the obstetric service environment in affecting women's use of facility delivery care. METHODS Data c...

Measurement of the availability of health care providers in a geographic area is a useful component in assessing access to health care. One of the problems associated with the county provider-to-population ratio as a measure of availability is that patients frequently travel outside their counties of residence for health care, especially those residing in nonmetropolitan counties. Thus, in meas...

PROBLEM/CONDITION Suicide is a public health problem and one of the top 10 leading causes of death in the United States. Substantial geographic variations in suicide rates exist, with suicides in rural areas occurring at much higher rates than those occurring in more urban areas. Understanding demographic trends and mechanisms of death among and within urbanization levels is important to develo...

We discovered an emerging non-metropolitan mortality penalty by contrasting 37 years of age-adjusted mortality rates for metropolitan versus nonmetropolitan US counties. During the 1980s, annual metropolitan-nonmetropolitan differences averaged 6.2 excess deaths per 100,000 nonmetropolitan population, or approximately 3600 excess deaths; however, by 2000 to 2004, the difference had increased mo...

Few studies empirically estimate the effects of metropolitan growth on nonmetropolitan communities at a national scale. This paper estimates the growth effects of 276 MSAs on population in 1,988 nonmetropolitan communities in the United States from 2000 to 2007. We estimate the distance for growth spillovers from MSAs to nonmetropolitan communities and test the assumption that a single MSA infl...

In the Surveillance Summaries "Leading Causes of Death in Nonmetropolitan and Metropolitan Areas - United States, 1999-2014" and "Reducing Potentially Excess Deaths from the Five Leading Causes of Death in the Rural United States," an error occurred in Figure 5 and Figure 3, respectively. In the last panel of bar charts (stroke), the colors for the left-most set of bars (public health region 1)...