With 2.7 trillion dollars in annual health spending, America has no excuse for designs that have failed for decades with regard to rural health workforce development. Rural workforce failure can best be understood as the inevitable result of failure by design. Designs for revenue are insufficient to support the rural clinician workforce that would resolve deficits. The designs of health profess...

INTRODUCTION Medical schools in Australia are being funded by the Commonwealth Government Department of Health and Aging to move a considerable amount of undergraduate clinical education into rural and remote settings. There are concerns that these students may be disadvantaged in terms of exposure to appropriate clinical learning opportunities. This study compared learning opportunities for st...

PURPOSE The University of Missouri School of Medicine developed the Summer Community Program through which rising second-year medical students work alongside rural, community-based physician preceptors. This program is part of a comprehensive, longitudinal pipeline designed to increase student interest in rural practice. The authors describe the Summer Community Program, explain changes in stud...

In an effort to increase the accessibility and comprehensiveness of care for rural Veterans with HIV, the VA Office of Rural Health (ORH) funded a pilot telehealth collaborative care program that was developed and tested by the Veterans Rural Health Resource Center-Iowa City. Telehealth collaboration can put fragmented networks of primary and specialty care providers in touch. Clinical video te...

In most traditional communities definitions of health and illness intertwine with local beliefs and customs, and part of social and cultural facts that constitute everyday reality for the people. The basic principles of primary health care advocate essential health care that is scientific, and practical provided within a social and cultural context, using appropriate technologies readily availa...

BACKGROUND Diabetes care in rural communities often suffers because of physician shortages. When patients need to see an endocrinologist, long-distance travel to urban centers can constitute a barrier to care. OBJECTIVE To address this problem, we tested whether diabetes telemedicine consultations would be acceptable to rural patients and their primary care providers as an alternative care mo...

Health care in rural America presents challenges that states are addressing in a variety of ways. Many rural communities lack adequate access to primary and preventive services. More than three-quarters of the nation’s rural counties are designated as health professional shortage areas.1 In addition to the scarcity of primary care providers and services in rural areas, the people who live there...